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Misunderstanding Materials: Incorrect Reports That Apple Has Contracted the Production of 18-Foot-Long “Continuous, Seamless White Oak” Tables

We’re used to seeing Apple push the designs of their own physical products. What’s interesting is when they also have the capability to push the boundaries of design fields outside of their realm, as they presumably did with their forthcoming Norman-Foster-designed “Spaceship” campus. Now it’s come to light that there’s another industry, or at least company, that they’ve gotten to stretch the envelope: The furniture industry’s Dutch table manufacturer Arco.

As Design Milk reports, Apple contracted the company to produce 500 tables for their upcoming campus, in a staggering 18-foot length. That part is true. Also true is that the tables are both beautiful and quite the production feat to execute. What’s not true, at least judging by the photos, is that “These extra large Pod Island Tables by Arco are constructed from continuous sheets of solid Spesshart [sic] white oak sourced from the fairytale forests of Germany” and that they are comprised of “continuous, seamless white oak.”

We could forgive the “Spesshart” typo (Spessart refers to a wooded mountain range in Germany where the oak is being sourced from), but the “continuous” and “seamless” part, which other publications are now quoting and repeating as fact, is simply inaccurate. Take a look at the tabletops, and look closely at the photos:

The grain pattern indicates those are veneers of the flat variety (as opposed to, say, the distorted grain patterns you see in the spiral cut veneers used in plywood) and you can clearly see that they have been glued up, side grain to side grain. 

Again I say, these tables and Arco’s production results are beautiful, it is the reporting that is incorrect: These are no more “seamless” than a butcher-block table is seamless. The internet being what it is, you now have publications quoting the original article and reinterpreting that to mean the tabletops are created “from a single sheet of wood,” which is obviously not true, as you can see from the visible joints below.

The original article also states that “Arco devised a new technique to peel away very precise, thin layers off of single oak slabs, layering these continuous sheets into a seamless surface.” More detail would be nice here, so that we can understand exactly what is “new” about the technique; as described, it does Arco a disservice, as the sentence may as well be describing the production of common veneers. We also don’t see any slab-width veneers here. In the photos above and below you can see the striations of alternating strips. Lastly, the choice of the word “peel” is curious as it implies the spiral-cut method used for plywood, which is inconsistent with the grain patterns depicted. The pieces in these photos all appear to have been sawn:

It is possible that by using the words “seamless” and “continuous,” the original writer is referring to the fact that we can’t see any end-grain-to-end-grain joints. That Arco is able to produce 18-foot-long veneers without any end-butting is indeed impressive. But we are always surprised when layfolk miss simple details like where clearly different surfaces are joined together. There is also a claim that the tables are being transported in “capacious 40’ x 40’ shipping containers,” which would require a rather odd-looking truck to transport them.