Within Plant Life: The Nature of Design, Joris Laarman’s Ply loop chair, 2025 proposes a fundamentally different relationship between making and living systems.
Contemporary designers such as the Netherlands-born Laarman are working with the properties of the plants themselves – including their cellular structure, growth patterns and end-of-life behaviour – rather than engineering around them, employing a range of new materials across industry. Think design objects made from a fascinating array of new composites and bioplastics, such as hemp, algae, eelgrass, mycelium, date palm waste, macadamia shell waste, PaperShell (compressed Kraft paper) and more. These are not material experiments in isolation. They represent early evidence of what a new design language rooted in biology will look like and, one hopes, these design objects will soon begin to flow into our everyday lives.
For a new material to be ‘regenerative’ and to genuinely heal rather than simply substitute, it must be considered from every angle: from growth to manufacture to end of life. Joris Laarman’s Ply loop chair meets this standard at every stage, and it does so by addressing the hidden history at the heart of one of modernism’s most celebrated materials: plywood.
Plywood is, at its most fundamental level, a composite material made with adhesives. The concept of laminating thin layers of wood to create a stronger, more stable composite dates to ancient Egypt and Rome. Artisans laid high-quality veneers over cheaper backing timbers to resist warping and save material. The glues they used were entirely natural: animal and plantbased binders drawn from the same ecosystem as the timber itself. This relationship endured until the 1930s, when the plywood industry underwent a transformation, the consequences of which are still being reckoned with today.
The introduction of synthetic, petroleum-based resins, most significantly urea-formaldehyde, changed everything. Cheap, fast-curing, and producing a clear and colourless bond, urea-formaldehyde became the global standard for plywood across many applications including furniture and cabinetry. It allowed plywood to become a genuinely democratic material: light, strong, affordable and endlessly versatile. Charles and Ray Eames’s Leg splint, 1943 (Purchased NGV Supporters of Decorative Arts), also on display in the Plant Life exhibition, demonstrates the formal brilliance that became possible. What it does not clearly communicate, however, is the compound bonding its layers: formaldehyde, a known human carcinogen, which off-gases from plywood throughout its life, rendering it non-recyclable and ecologically persistent at its functional end. When discarded, modern engineered wood degrades not into the soil but into toxic micro-particles that accumulate in ecosystems indefinitely. Subsequent industry responses such as lower-emission phenol-formaldehyde resins and E0-rated adhesives have reduced the health hazard but left the fundamental problem intact. The glue is still synthetic, still non-biodegradable, still petrochemical dependent and still concealed within an apparently natural material.
This is the problem Laarman has spent years working to solve with the Ply loop chair his most fully realised response to date. The chair uses Plantics, a thermoset bio-resin developed from the waste streams of the sugar beet industry by the Dutch firm of the same name, with Laarman Lab as an advisor and shareholder. Based on a revolutionary invention from the University of Amsterdam, Plantics is the first 100 percent bio-based thermosetting resin in the world. Non-toxic, fully biodegradable under natural conditions, and carbon-negative by virtue of the plants that produced it, Plantics does not merely replace a harmful compound. It closes the loop that urea-formaldehyde opened. A chair made with Plantics can, at the end of its life, return to the biological cycle from which it came. The glue no longer breaks the chain.
But Plantics does something else no conventional plywood adhesive can: it stays workable and malleable right up until it is set in a kiln. This specific chemical property is what makes the Ply loop chair possible as an object. The extended working time allowed Laarman’s team to push oak and walnut veneer into the continuous, spiralling, computationally-generated curves that define the chair’s form, geometries that fast-curing industrial resins would have made structurally impossible. The chair’s extraordinary visual complexity is not decoration applied over an ecological proposition. It is the direct consequence of the ecological proposition itself. Form follows material.
Laarman describes his practice as oriented toward the Symbiocene, a term coined by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe a future era in which human civilisation exists in genuine symbiosis with living systems rather than at their expense. The Ply loop chair is an experiment in what that era’s design language might sound like: organic in its geometry, biological in its chemistry, and honest in the relationship it proposes between the made world and the living one. The chair does not claim to have solved the problem of plywood at industrial scale. It claims something more precise and more useful: that the technical foundation for a solution now exists. This is what it looks like when a designer takes the solution seriously.
The NGV is seeking to acquire Ply loop chair for its design collection, joining the four works by Laarman already in the NGV Collection (all acquired for the inaugural NGV Triennial in 2017 with the support of the Donald Russell Elford and Dorothy Grace Elford Bequest). The chair will be the first work in the Collection to represent this new phase of the Dutch artist’s research, and the first work in any Australian public collection to demonstrate, at the scale of a major design object, what plant-based thermoset chemistry makes possible.
In the context of Plant Life, it is not only a significant acquisition. It is one of the exhibition’s most precise and enduring propositions and an important work of contemporary design that marks a genuine shift forward. It is a marker of design leaving the unintended consequences of modernism as it embraces a more holistic and informed future, where material transparency and life cycle are expressed and communicated as an attribute and solution, rather than hidden value.
Ewan McEoin is NGV Senior Curator, Contemporary Design and Architecture.
This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 60 Sep-Oct 2026.