Garden Egg Chair

One of the things I was impressed with in the V&A museum was Garden Egg Chair. It was designed by Peter Ghyczy and is a furniture that really looks like an egg when folded, but becomes a comfortable chair when it opens. There are several reasons why the chair has been specially selected and placed in the museum among many modern chairs.

First of all, it is one of the products that has become historic in connection with the Cold War. Now, more than 20 years have passed since the reunification of Germany, and since the Berlin Wall in East and West Germany collapsed, Germans are still struggling to overcome the history of the Cold War. By the mid-1990s, people were remodeling their homes and offices at an unprecedented rate, and a tremendous amount of East German material culture was being thrown into a waste bin. Thus people who spent most of their lives in a divided country are quickly forgetting their memories of that time, so experts need to preserve and interpret the items associated with that period in order to keep a record of it. Even curators at the V&A museum would not have been exempt. They tried to collect the dying material culture as much as possible before all of their records on GDR culture disappeared.

The chair was designed in West Germany and produced only a few prototypes, but was then mass-produced in East Germany. That is because the production costs on that way were much cheaper. Although these decisions were not unique, the industrial exchange between capitalist West Germany and socialist East Germany was not officially accepted at the time. As a result of its popularity at various trade shows and exhibitions, the chair has become the product of the symbolic 'East German' that it is currently hard to find.

In fact, whether the chair belongs to West Germany or East Germany may still be at the center of controversy. Although it is considered a symbol of Western consumption due to its mass production and the use of architectural technology developed by the Cold War's East-West ideological confrontation, it was eventually produced in East Germany for a much longer time. However, it is clear that the chair is in an important position for experts at the moment; as I mentioned earlier, its value is an icon that reflects the era in which it was produced. The Garden Egg Chair tends to emphasize the unique interrelationship between East and West Germany at the time. The chair's history shows a rare example of outsourcing from capitalist West Germany to socialist East Germany, thus giving a clear indication of economic exchanges between East and West Germany.

In conclusion, Garden Egg Chair can teach us a lot, which emphasizes the value of preserving material cultures to deepen people's understanding of history. The furniture itself is intertwined with the complicated design, production processes and perceptions of West and East Germany. As cultural and historical evidence shows us, it reveals in many ways the unseen relationship between East and West Germany.