It’s getting colder. The autumn leaves in the garden, which are colored benetton-colored, are falling. You stand at the window and wish that Markus Söder had started hugging the trees earlier. Then there would be more leaves. The more leaves graciously cover the world, the more peace there is. Until the leaf blowers come. Foliage is important. Right now, after two long summers of optimization mania fueled in home office mode, which has made the garden center a beneficiary of the pandemic. From an aesthetic point of view, many a garden has turned into a weatherproof hazardous waste dump due to the rampant outdoor furniture arms race.
Unfortunately, the designer Richard Schultz was also unable to prevent the garden junk on furniture that pretended to be a lounge ever more loudly. By the way, please pronounce it like this: Louuuuuunge. You see a leaf fall and dedicate your mind to the great designer who recently died in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 95.
German gardens suffer from the horror vacui – and have therefore become a horror in terms of design
Again you mourn someone who knew the formula for beautiful things. Because he helped invent it. Who did not want to make the world a Louuuuuunge, but a more stylish place. Whereby he did not misunderstand the garden as the appendage of the over-furnished living room, but rather as a stage on which the organic nature and the technically perfect culture of his inventions of form could meet at eye level.
As far as the architecture of elegance in the garden is concerned, one has surrendered to the SUV-like barbecue monsters for years anyway. Or in front of the giant trampolines that sports physicians reliably supply with new cases. Or in front of the pools, which look like XXL bathtubs but not pools. Although the gardens are getting smaller and more washcloth-like, they are picking up more and cheaper products from the DIY store’s grab box. German gardens suffer from the horror vacui – and that’s why they became a horror in terms of design. Couldn’t a garden just be a garden and not a furniture fair?
Classic of post-war modernism: Schultz’s garden lounger.
(Photo: Knoll international)
The furniture that Schultz, born in 1926, designed together with the Italian sculptor and furniture designer Harry Bertoia after studying at Iowa State University and the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, are early highlights of post-war modernism. The garden lounger developed in 1966 with the characteristic wheels (designed for Knoll) became the ultimate garden lounger: practical, robust, mobile and extremely filigree. You can’t tell from the furniture that it was originally intended to withstand strong weather conditions by the sea. You only see the sea in it. The holiday-like. A carefree ease.
This also applies to the “Petal Collection” developed by Schultz for Bertoias wire mesh chairs with table tops that appear to float like flower petals. The “1966 Leisure Collection” became technologically significant, but also style-defining for modern outdoor furniture design. But at Schultz, “weatherproof” never meant renouncing formal ambition. His furniture should fit into the garden landscape in a sculptural and yet serving manner. They should be comfortable, robust, confident – and discreet at the same time. Far too seldom do you come across such furniture in the gardens, which then rest as relaxed and longingly on the green as white sailing boats.