It’s a well-known irony that the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize invented dynamite. But did you know that his father, Immanuel Nobel, developed the log-peeling rotary lathe used to manufacture plywood? An upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Plywood: Material, Process, Form, traces the history of the material that Popular Science once dubbed “a layer cake of lumber and glue.” The installation includes furniture designs by Eero Saarinen, Sori Yanaji, and the Eamses, whose 1944 lounge chair is shown below. Lesser known are plywood’s applications for the aeronautics industry, examples of which are also on display. Through Feb. 27. • moma.org
