A Danish Lighting Brand Just Reissued Its Most Controversial Chair
By Sana Kovač
It was pulled from production after a single season in 1971, and for fifty-four years the only way to sit in one was to find a collector willing to let you.
Manufacturing decided most of this, as it usually does. The tooling that survived set the limits, and the design worked inside them.
Mette Lindqvist, the brand's design director, has been close to it from the start.
What changed
The original chair used a cantilevered steel frame that flexed further than the market was ready for. Two dealers refused to stock it.
The timeline tells its own story: eighteen months from first conversation to the point anyone outside the room saw anything, and then six weeks in which everything visible was decided.
The archive drawings were incomplete, so the team worked from three surviving chairs and a set of 1970 press photographs.
We were not going to make it politer. The whole point of the chair is that it moves.
Lindqvist
How it works
The reissue keeps the flex and changes the foam. The seat is now a moulded latex core, which holds its shape through the movement the frame allows.
The reissue market rewards fidelity and punishes nostalgia, and the difference between them is usually a single component.
Reaction has split along predictable lines. The people who have to maintain it have the sharpest questions, and the fairest ones.
They are careful about what they claim. Two of the decisions that look deliberate now were, by their own account, the only option left by the time anyone noticed.
What happens next
It ships in March, in the original four colours and one the brand describes only as a mistake worth keeping.
