CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Bentwood
Wood softened with steam, bent around a form and set in a curve, the basis of Thonet café chairs and later moulded plywood furniture.
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About
Bentwood is made by softening wood with steam or hot water, forcing it around a mould and letting it set in the curve. Craftspeople used the principle long before industry did: the hooped backs of English Windsor chairs, Shaker oval boxes and the cedar boxes of the Northwest Coast, folded from a single grooved plank, all depend on it.
Michael Thonet turned it into mass production. Working first with glued laminates and then, from the 1850s, with solid beech rods clamped in iron forms, his Vienna firm produced Chair No. 14 (1859): a few bent parts and a handful of screws, light enough to ship in pieces around the world. Modernist designers took up moulded plywood instead, as in Alvar Aalto's Paimio Chair (1931–32) and Sori Yanagi's Butterfly Stool (1954). Good examples show grain running unbroken along each curve, with no cracks on the outer face.
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