Richard Schultz, designer who made the outdoors modern, is dead at 95

Richard Schultz, the ingenious industrial designer whose furniture collections for Knoll, the design laboratory that streamlined American interiors, are among the classics of modern design, died Sept. 28 in Princeton, New Jersey. He was 95.

He had been in ill health, his son Peter said.

Rust was the catalyst for Schultz’s most enduring design: an elegant, clean-lined outdoor chaise made from plastic mesh, aluminum tubes and a pair of wheels.

Florence Knoll, Schultz’s boss, had taken a few metal chairs by sculptor and designer Harry Bertoia to her seaside house in Florida, and they had rusted out. (The Bertoia chairs are another modernist classic, manufactured by Knoll, which Schultz had helped form.) She asked Schultz to make something that could withstand the elements.

In those days, in the early 60s, as Schultz wrote in “Form Follows Technique: A Design Manifesto” (2019), most outdoor furniture looked as if it had been designed before the French Revolution, “with stamped-out metal, bunches of flowers and leaves. It was very much period looking furniture.”

Schultz set to work to make outdoor pieces with no extraneous curves.

The chaise from the Leisure Collection — as it was called and a name that made its designer wince — was an instant hit when it came on the market in 1966. The Museum of Modern Art acquired its sleek prototype for its permanent collection. More than five decades later, it is still in production.

Writing in The New York Times in 1999, William Hamilton said it was “still as crisp to see and sit in as a summer-weight suit.”

An earlier, more fanciful outdoor piece, Schultz’s petal table, was inspired by Queen Anne’s lace, with separate teak “petals” sprouting from individual metal stems that collect at the base. The clever design allows the petals to expand and contract with the elements. It, too, was quickly acquired by MoMA.

These two museum pieces, “the table, with its big petals, and the chaise, with its training wheels,” wrote Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, in an email, “always struck me as two characters from a silhouetted 1960s cartoon, materialized in real life by an equally exact and optimistic manufacturer. For an Italian design buff, it was ‘America’ at its finest.”

In the early 1990s, Schultz had been on his own for decades, selling his designs to various furniture companies, including Knoll, when he began working with cardboard and then sheet metal, punching holes in the material to simulate the dappled shade of sunlight piercing through leaves, and slicing the pieces into simple shapes to make chairs and sofas for a collection he called Topiary.

“I wanted to design a chair which looked like a shrub pruned to look like a chair,” Schultz said. “I am fascinated by the way sunlight comes through the leaves of shrubbery. This furniture acts like a light filter, disappearing into nature. Sometimes, the pattern looks like flowers. Covered with dew. it looks alive.”

The major outdoor-furniture manufacturers found this work too weird to buy, however, said Peter Schultz, so he encouraged his father to make it himself. He did, with the help of Peter, an architect. Knoll had dropped the Leisure Collection in the 1980s, and father and son produced that, too. The company gave Schultz the license and the molds it was made from, and he promptly renamed it the 1966 Collection. In 2012, Knoll bought the collection back.

Moses Richard Schultz was born Sept. 22, 1926, in Lafayette, Indiana. His father, Bernard, owned a chain of local clothing stores; his mother, Mary (Howard) Schultz, was a homemaker. As a child, Richard made steam engines in the family basement, and his mother thought he should be an engineer. Math, it turned out, was not his strongest subject, so he dropped out of Iowa State University and enlisted in the Navy, where he worked as a radio operator.