After the Second World War Egon Eiermann (1904-1970) was commissioned to design and furnish a four-room apartment for the Wie Wohnen? (How to Live) exhibition in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe (1949-50). The aim of the exhibition was to promote modern furniture design that explored new materials and industrial manufacturing methods. Industrial manufacture was seen as the only way to meet the huge demand for new furniture in Germany – caused by vast wartime destruction of housing and the post-war arrival of large numbers of refugees from Germany’s eastern territories.

Eiermann did not have experience in the field of industrial design and had previously only designed furniture to be produced in small numbers. In the spring of 1949, in preparation for the exhibition, Eiermann began to collaborate with the rolling blind and furniture factory Wilde + Spieth to develop plywood furniture that could be produced on an industrial scale. One of the products they created was the model SE 42 chair which was shown in the exhibition and became the first of Eiermann’s designs to go into serial production. The chair very directly re-uses the Eames’ 1946 design for the DCW (dining chair wood). It takes almost exactly the same form as the DCW with only a few minor adjustments – it has three legs instead of four and the fixings are different to the Eames’ design (although the Eameses had designed three legged versions of their chairs which never went into production).