Verner Panton trained as an architectural engineer in Odense before attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. From 1950 to 1952, he collaborated with Arne Jacobsen, notably on the famous Ant chair. In 1955, Panton broke off this partnership and founded his own design studio. By the late 1950s, his chairs were becoming less and less conventional: the legs were disappearing and the backs were fading. Verner Panton would revisit this idea many times; in 1960, he designed the first injection-moulded plastic chair, the Panton chair. It was an S-shaped chair that could be easily fitted together. Towards the end of the 1960s, Verner Panton temporarily abandoned the design of objects to devote himself to designing psychedelic domestic environments, composed of curved shapes, wallpapered walls and light occupying the entire available space. One of the most notable examples is the design of the interior of the Loreley ocean liner in Cologne in 1970, commissioned by Bayer AG. He also designed the offices of the newspaper Der Spiegel in Germany and the Astoria Hotel in Trondheim, Norway, with its circular motifs and cylindrical objects.