For furniture designer Paul Loebach, the hierarchy of design innovation in America goes like this: first fighter planes, then bikes, then chairs. To find out what the next big thing in industrial design is going to be, just look up the ladder. "In America," Loebach says, "we have really advanced technology and machinery, and it's mostly in defense, but it trickles down through sports. We're only just starting to get carbon furniture, but we've had carbon bikes for a few years. We had titanium bikes in the '80s. Bikes are where to look for what's next."

Bikes are canaries in the industrial design mine, and three of them perch on the wall of Loebach's studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Loebach is a rare kind of designer. He's interested in the machines and materials that make his furniture as much as in the furniture itself. Maybe even more. This obsession has led him to the top of the design food chain -- aerospace engineering -- and today, Loebach uses this high-tech equipment, combined with a love of wood steeped in tradition, to make furniture as complex as an F-16 but as subtle as a Shaker bench.

Loebach's philosophy sounds like a contradiction, but it comes naturally to him. Thirty-four, tall, and skinny, he's dressed in what passes for a varsity letter jacket at his alma mater, the Rhode Island School of Design: old t-shirt, tight jeans, and rap-video-caliber florescent yellow Nikes, carefully faded. That is to say, Loebach is hip. He can't help it. His mother writes cultural theory and his father is an engineer who, when Loebach was a kid, would talk to him about things like Japanese sports car design. These opposing worldviews -- one intellectual, the other grounded in material nuts and bolts -- animated Loebach's years at RISD. There, lathe in one hand, Lacan in the other, Loebach studied wood construction in the studio and media theory at Brown University, up the hill from RISD. When he graduated, he moved to Brooklyn to work with furniture maker John Davies. "The guy was totally old school," Loebach says. "He did all pencil drawings and had these huge slide rules mounted on the wall. I was basically his apprentice."

But while Loebach was digging into traditional American craft, his classmates were checking out. "I had all these RISD friends who moved to Holland like, 'fuck it, I'm European now,'" he says. But Loebach couldn't jump ship, even if the American design scene looks more like a canoe compared to Europe's big-money yacht. "Someone has to stand up for it," Loebach says. "There's still a feeling here that America needs Europe to validate relevant design."

Loebach's America is a tech geek's paradise, home to the most cutting-edge manufacturing equipment around. Most of it churns out smart bombs and spy planes -- not exactly friendly to a humble chair maker -- so when Loebach found an aerospace engineering company interested in getting a hold on the design industry, he pounced. (He knows how rare a find this was, and he keeps the company's name a secret.)

In his Chair-O Space and Shelf Space, Loebach takes traditional forms, a traditional material, and an unconventional process, and makes something eerily recognizable but totally unique. "It was about knowing the material and the machinery and doing something that you couldn't do otherwise," he explains. "It looks familiar, but you couldn't really get those shapes by steaming the wood or carving it by hand." The pieces, he says, exist in a "space between being referential and using a new language."

The chair, for example, has a turned knob on each leg. It's a classic move -- we've seen it before -- but look closer. This turn sits on a curve, not a straight piece of wood. That kind of detail is impossible to get with typical woodworking tools, and the subtlety of it makes it a surprising twist. "We're so used to looking at chairs," Loebach says, "that when something's different, we're like, 'woah.' It knocks through the filter of what we see every day."

Loebach isn't all mad scientist, though. He tempers his geeked-out vision of what furniture can be in good old-fashioned Industrial Design 101. There's a fair amount of digital renderings tacked to Loebach's studio walls -- the aerospace machines run on complicated computer programs -- but they're nothing compared to the reams of tracing-paper sketches stacked in a huge filing cabinet in the corner. He pulls out the Chair-O Space folder. It's three inches thick. "I'm not part of that generation that just thinks digitally," Loebach explains, thumbing through the pages. "You know, all that jelly bean stuff from the '90s that looks like it was just printed out. I'm lucky to know what life was like before email." Thinking on paper gives Loebach room to play with ideas. "The translation from the screen to the real world isn't direct," he says. "There's a space in between where design happens."

That space is the realm of the material. The ideas Loebach sketches and the capabilities of the machines he uses intersect in the wood, and its organic quirks -- what it can handle, and what it can't -- tweak and ultimately dictate the design. Loebach comes from a long line of German carpenters and he talks about wood the way some people talk about wine -- the grain, the color, the feel, the strength.

He's material-minded, which is to say he's a pure designer. "There's a fine line between design and art," Loebach says, and though he's shown some work in galleries, he resists the urge to completely cross over into the art world. Art is all about the idea; design makes that idea physical, it's about craft. Loebach leans back and waxes theoretical. "Everyone's trying to move away from permanence," he says. "Music is the ultimate goal; musicians don't leave any garbage behind. So painters want to be musicians, designers want to be artists, and architects want to be designers." But not Loebach. "I don't aspire to be an artist, really," Loebach admits. "There's just nothing like a good factory tour."