Peter Ghyczy

Peter Ghyczy 2006

Peter Ghyczy (born December 1, 1940 in Budapest ) is a German designer of Hungarian descent who lives in the Netherlands .

Live and act

The Senftenberger egg at a trade fair stand in the GDR

Senftenberger Egg in the GDR Museum Pirna

biography

As the child of an extensive, noble family, he grew up in the Buda district . In 1945, after the invasion of the Red Army , in which the father was killed, he came to the Vásárosnamény family estate in the Puszta , where he also went to the village school. In 1947 he was sent to Belgium by the Red Cross for a year and learned French . In 1952, when the property was expropriated, he returned to his mother in Budapest and finished primary school there. In 1954 he went to the Benedictine boarding school in Pannonhalma in Northern Hungary .

In 1956, after the crackdown on the Hungarian uprising against the communist regime, he fled with his mother and brother via Vienna to Bonn . Here he graduated from high school in 1960 and then studied architecture at the Technical University in Aachen with a focus on structural engineering. In 1961 he was assisted by Professor Rudolf Steinbach, a well-known architect, and later also worked in the faculty's plastics institute. This was followed by participation in the Unesco project in Kalabsha in Egypt , in which antiquities were saved from a dam . In 1967 he graduated in architecture from RWTH Aachen University with a thesis on a new type of school architecture.

From 1968 to 1972 he lived in Lemförde in the Diepholz district . In 1969 he took on German citizenship. Peter Ghyczy is married and has four children. Today he lives in Beesel in the Netherlands.

Work as a designer

Peter Ghyczy, multicultural and multilingual, belongs to the line of designers who were also immigrants - including Henry van de Velde , Marcel Breuer , Hans Gugelot and Peter Maly , and who have significantly influenced German design. In 1968 he took on a managerial role as a freelancer at Elastogran in Lemförde in southern Lower Saxony, where he was responsible for the development of polyurethane products . Owner and company director Gottfried Reuter, originally a chemist at Bayer in Leverkusen, was a luminary in the field of polyurethane technology, for which he held numerous patents. On this basis he built up a group of companies in the 1960s, for which he finally founded his own design department in Lemförde.

Between 1968 and 1972 Peter Ghyczy developed numerous innovative designs in Lemförde, which - so far nowhere documented - identify him as one of the most productive designers of those years. In 1970 the “Design Center” opened in Lemförde, a building based on Ghyczy's design, which was also made entirely of polyurethane and, as a plastic architecture, was itself an innovation. It was one of the early German design studios whose close interlinking of technical development and product design was exemplary and which had a unique position in the plastics industry. In addition to new, modular components, such as emergency shelters and facade elements, a wide variety of furniture, including chairs, shell armchairs, living areas, tables, shelves and plastic door fronts for offices and kitchens, was created here. Licenses were given to well-known companies, including a. to Drabert , the United Workshops , Vitra (then still Fehlbaum GmbH) and Beylarian in the USA. Of all this, only one model has become known: the "Gartenei" from 1968, the first foldable armchair. The “Design Center” was closed as early as 1972 and later demolished. Reuter sold his company to BASF and - secretly - the polyurethane technology at the same time to the GDR, which received the garden egg as an addition . So it came about that this Ghyczy design was also produced in the GDR by the VEB Synthesewerk Schwarzheide (today: BASF Schwarzheide ) near Senftenberg in unknown numbers. After it became a cult object and a coveted collector's item in the art scene in the late 1990s as a “Senftenberger Egg” - often mistakenly viewed as a GDR design - Peter Ghyczy re-issued his design himself.

In 1972 he founded Ghyczy + Co Design in Viersen and presented his first own furniture collection . He applied for patents for a number of his designs, in particular for the clamping technology he developed to connect glass and metal , on the basis of which Ghyczy developed a new, frame-free table shape that was often copied and on which he built an entire product family. Ultimately, the R 03 clamp bracket emerged , a rack-free shelf and long since an anonymous classic that today - as a plagiarism - is hardly missing in any hardware store. Numerous lamp designs and the like come from Peter Ghyczy. a. the MegaWatt series and the MW 17 table lamp , a curved, balanced tube and thus a further frame-free construction - a principle that is reminiscent of the cantilever chair in terms of design history. Peter Ghyczy used metal castings, in particular cast aluminum and brass , in numerous products . This process goes back to his early experiences with casting technology in plastics.

In 1974 Peter Ghyczy moved the company headquarters to the Netherlands, where the company now operated under the name Ghyczy Selection . In 1985 the company moved to Swalmen , where the company still exists today.