New York’s Michelin Stars Dined Out on Pandemic Plywood Barricades
- Jul 14
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Australian firm BVN cut the boards nailed over New York's locked-down shopfronts into a CNC kit of parts adopted by Gramercy Tavern and Crown Shy for under $200,000, shortlisted at the 25th Australian Timber Design Awards before winning silver at the 2024 NY Product Design Awards.
The full length of a re-ply canopy on a Manhattan street, its birch plywood arches cut on CNC from reclaimed sheets and repeating down the block over tables and planting. A social initiative of BVN, designed and fabricated by re-ply. (Photo Credit: Ernesto Roman)
When New York boarded up its shopfronts through the pandemic and protests of 2020, thousands of sheets of structural plywood were destined for landfill, but the New York studio of Australian architecture firm BVN saw free raw material at street scale and founded re-ply that June. It comes as Kylan Low, organiser of the Australian Timber Design Awards, makes his final call for 2026 entries ahead of Friday’s deadline, with organisers holding the shortlisted project up as exactly the kind of entry the program exists to find.
Led by BVN principal Bill Dowzer with designers Nick Flutter and Nikita Notowidigdo, re-ply is a fully recycled, CNC-cut kit of parts for the pop-up restaurants, exhibitions and co-working spaces that repopulated the reopening city. Because its detailing is agnostic to material thickness, almost any reclaimed sheet can be used in the system.
Working with CNC-equipped fabricators across the city, the team compressed design-to-installation to as little as 6 weeks and delivered more than 25 projects in the first phase. When winter set in, it added a modular canopy designed on greenhouse principles to passively warm the outdoor rooms beneath.
“Re-ply has used entirely reclaimed and repurposed plywood; therefore, it has no materials cost,” BVN said of the initiative, whose 3D fabrication files can be sent to any CNC woodworking operation, keeping manufacturing local and total spend under $200,000. Installed rather than built on site, every structure can be deconstructed, relocated or modified as needs change.
Diners and remote workers beneath the arched plywood canopy, the repeating ribs cut on CNC from reclaimed sheets. Designed and fabricated by re-ply, a social initiative of BVN. (Photo Credit: Ernesto Roman)
From barricade to banquette, the system was embraced by more than 60 of New York’s restaurants and venues, with Michelin-starred Gramercy Tavern and Crown Shy alongside Wayan, NeueHouse, Scarpetta and The Rockefeller Center. Its arched canopies and scalloped planters became a familiar sight on Manhattan footpaths through two winters of outdoor service, before the city’s permanent Dining Out NYC rules banned enclosed roadway structures and cleared the last pandemic sheds from the kerb in late 2024.
A re-ply planter and screen at Gramercy Tavern, the scalloped base and slotted uprights cut from reclaimed plywood on CNC. Designed and fabricated by re-ply, a social initiative of BVN. (Photo Credit: Nick Flutter, BVN)
Crown Shy itself is named for crown shyness, the forest phenomenon in which the crowns of mature trees refuse to touch, a name chef Jassimran Singh says was chosen for the slivers of sky between New York’s towers and an accidental piece of poetry for a dining room that took its pandemic service beneath a plywood canopy.
Rather than ending with the sheds, the initiative has expanded bicoastally to San Francisco and evolved into re-ply 2.0, a fully engineered circular modular system rented as a service and designed to meet the new Dining Out NYC standards. Recognition has tracked that evolution, with a shortlisting for Australian Designed International Projects at the 25th Australian Timber Design Awards, carrying Sustainability and Small Budget merit, and a Silver Medal for Eco-Sustainable Design at the 2024 NY Product Design Awards.
The full elevation of a re-ply canopy at dusk, its translucent vaulted roof and scalloped plywood planters running the length of the block as diners settle in beneath. A social initiative of BVN, designed and fabricated by re-ply. (Photo Credit: Ernesto Roman / Nick Flutter)
Now the awards have brought re-ply home as the face of their final entry drive, held up before a field Low describes as the strongest the program has ever assembled. At one end sit landmarks such as the new Sydney Fish Market and the Cutaway pushing the global frontier of timber engineering, and at the other, the biggest surge in furniture and joinery entries the awards have seen.
Re-ply sits squarely at that second end, built from offcuts and sheet goods rather than mass timber yet international in reach. What Low wants entrants to bring, above all, is provenance, and the best entries this year, he argued, can trace their timber to the forest, the mill and the hands that shaped it.
Provenance, in re-ply’s case, begins not in a forest but on the boarded-up streets of a city in lockdown, a lineage no less traceable for being reclaimed. BVN has since widened the model beyond plywood to other reclaimed materials, proof that the humblest sheet of salvaged timber can still bring people back together.
“If your project can tell it, you have until Friday,” Low said, with entries to the 2026 program closing on 10 July and re-ply, cut for under $200,000 from sheets once bound for landfill, the measure of how far a small budget can go.
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