Gallery Talk: Richard Schultz

Form Follows Technique, a talk about how design happens, by Richard Schultz

“Form Follows Technique is Richard Schultz’s personal view of the creative endeavors of humans interacting with the elements of their world – wood, metal and stone – absent the boundaries of time or culture. Design surrounds us, in form and technique.” – Brian Lutz, author of Eero Saarinen: Furniture for Everyman.

Richard Schultz is a furniture designer whose iconic designs are rooted in the approach to design that he learned in the late 1940s at the Institute of Design in Chicago, which more than design, taught creativity modeled on the tenets of its founder, László Moholy-Nagy. For Schultz, “It was indoctrination, like joining a religion with emphasis on achievements in art in the 20th century. You were trained to design anything, to apply this thinking that was so strongly presented as a way of life. I felt born again. I was completely involved in it from the very beginning.”

In 1951 Schultz’s first job was to assist the sculptor Harry Bertoia with his creation of the Bertoia Wire Collection at Knoll, a position at a furniture company that, for Schultz, was more like a postgraduate course than a job. To complement the Bertoia collection, Schultz designed a chaise that was selected by MoMA New York in 1963 for its permanent collection of contemporary furniture. Around that time, he also began working on designs for a line of outdoor furniture using cast aluminum frames and nylon slings, a radical departure from any outdoor furniture available at that time. Knoll introduced this as its Leisure Line in 1966, and it is still sold today, 50 years later, as the 1966 Collection. (It is also included in MoMA’s permanent design collection.)

In 1972 Schultz left Knoll to develop designs for various leading furniture companies, including Stow/Davis, DoMore, Conde House (Japan), and Nienkamper (Canada) before he started Richard Schultz Design, Inc. with his son Peter in 1992. With his own company, he reintroduced the 1966 Collection, and he created new lines of outdoor furniture such as the Topiary Collection, which again broke through existing boundaries of design. “I wanted to design a chair that looks like a shrub pruned to look like a chair.”

In addition to designing furniture, Schultz is a sculptor whose work has been shown at MoMA and the Staempfli Gallery in New York. His furniture also has been shown at or is part of the permanent collections of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Design Collection of the Louvre Museum, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Montreal, the Keiji Nagai Collection in Fukuoka, Japan, and Vitra Design Museum, Germany.

This event is presented in partnership with Marlboro College.

ADMISSION: Free