This collapsible armchair, made for in- and outdoor use, has a German-German history. Peter Ghyczy designed it for the company Elastogran, which operated a factory for polyurethane products in Lemförde, Lower Saxony, in the 1960s and 1970s. While running the design center there from 1968 to 1972, Ghyczy designed numerous innovative pieces of furniture made from plastic. In 1968, the armchair was exhibited at the Cologne furniture fair, which was dominated by the plastics boom and pop design of the time. To reduce costs, the company relocated polyurethane production from Lemförde to the Lusatian town of Senftenberg in the former GDR (German Democratic Republic or East Germany) three years later. The armchair was manufactured there from 1971 to 1975, which is why it is also known as the “Senftenberg Egg.” Elastogran supplied the technology, machines and Ghyczy’s design, and 15,000 egg seats were to be delivered to Lower Saxony in return. In 1971, however, Elastogran was sold in its entirety to BASF, which did not restart production of the armchair.
Nevertheless, the armchair remained in production in Senftenberg until 1975 and was sold in large numbers to socialist countries. And whereas the oil crisis in Western Europe ended the plastics boom there as early as 1973, the factory in Senftenberg was less affected because it obtained the crude oil required for polyurethane production from the USSR. In 1973, the armchair was exhibited at the Leipzig trade fair, but with no mention of the designer by name nor his previous history in the BRD (Federal Republic of Germany or West Germany). As a result, the armchair was regarded as a genuine GDR design for a long time—a deliberate mistake. The armchair in our collection bears a production stamp from June 11, 1974.
The history of the “Senftenberg Egg” illustrates how a product design can be made and distributed by different manufacturers as long as machines, materials, and expertise are available. This means that not only design and production, but also distribution are part of design history.
The disappearance of Peter Ghyczy’s name from this story was, however, only temporary. In the 1990s, the designer relaunched the Garden Egg in the Netherlands as part of his Ghyczy collection.