plastics - The customer magazine from BASF 2/2007

Design
The birth of a design chair: industrial designer Konstantin Grcic (on the right) with Italian furniture manufacturer Martin Plank.
The pinnacle in design
The debut of the MYTO design chair
Miles and miles of pipelines,
asphalt, metal containers,
workers wearing hard hats: a
chemical production site is no place
for people whose job is to ponder the
beautiful things in life – well, that’s
what one thinks. But at least at BASF,
this notion does not apply: in fact, this
has become a place where designers
meet.
Let’s take, for instance, the summer of
2006 and, for example, Konstantin Grcic,
freelance industrial designer from Munich,
Germany, who has already treated the
world to all sorts of exquisite creations.
Stools, chairs, lamps, sofas, certainly
useful products but always with a slight
touch of the unconventional. What is such
a designer doing in such a place? “Even
though I was aware of BASF, it seemed
to me that such a corporation would be
almost unapproachable,” he explains.
“Too big for us to really be able to work
together with the people there.”
But such a collaboration was exactly the
goal of the so-called “Universal Days”,
back when BASF invited four renowned
industrial designers to a get-together. “We
intentionally sought contact with designers,”
explains one of the people who sat
across the desk from the designers last
year and who was determined to overcome
such barriers, namely, Anja Bakker,
of BASF’s Applications Development
for Engineering Plastics. “We wanted to
show the designers all that can be done
with modern plastics. “In this endeavor,
we chose to steer clear of tables and
complex graphics. Instead, we gave them
concrete, hands-on examples of what it
was all about.”
Engineering plastics
open doors
A year later, Grcic comments with amazement
how he embraced the whole thing
back then with the wide-eyed enthusiasm
of a child, “This invitation really opened
doors!” And it should not be overlooked
that this award-winning designer already
had many years of experience working
with plastics. But BASF was showcasing
its high-end materials such as Ultradur ®
High Speed (PBT). “These mechanically
remarkable plastics were something quite
new to us; these Ultras impressed me
especially because of their engineering
properties!” A few weeks later, there was
no doubt whatsoever: let’s make something
terrific with this material. A chair. A
free-swinging chair.
Why a chair? “To create a chair, that is
the pinnacle in design,” states Konstantin
Grcic. “A veritable icon that, in a manner
of speaking, ushered in the era of modern
furniture design in the first place, is Marcel
Breuer’s chair ‘Cesca’, created in 1928.”
This free-swinging chair, a chair practically
without back legs, has appeared in many
variants since then but in essence has remained
virtually unchanged: always made
of bent tubular steel and a seat cushion.”
Although Danish designer Verner Panton
created a plastic variant of the free-swinging
chair in the 1960s, the famous Panton
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