interior and furniture designer, born 1943, office in Stuttgart / Baden-Württemberg

 

The quintessential element in his occupation is after all the human being. If products are not “accepted”, then they have missed the point. That’s why sensual components and current perceptual patterns must always be taken into consideration. “This was made just for you”, should be the message. The aim of this holistic approach would ultimately be a “product culture” – a very German-sounding essence. As early as the end of the 1980s, Wulf Schneider already wrote a book on the “sense and nonsense” of the designer environment. After studying interior and product design in the 1960s and holding executive positions in business as well as a design professorship, he liked to expound upon the fundamentals of product design. The etern a l questioner, who has been working as a self-employed designer since the mid-1970s, has found a clientele that shares his demanding approach. He has been developing chairs for Thonet since the early 1980s, which regularly received awards even before design prizes started wildly proliferating. Among them are the models S 320 and S 570 as contemporary syntheses of wood and steel, as well as 290, a patented chair in only three parts, with the seating area cut out of the backrest piece. There followed the multipurpose easychair S 3500, a tubular steel design with a classic Bauhaus flavour whose easyto-remove seat cushion multiplies the comfort factor. Schneider also developed intelligent furniture for COR: The Clouupholstered cubes (1994 k p.419), a reinterpretation of the modular sofa, unite a range of practical combination options with unusual pro p o rtions and armrests that remind some of ears. Six years later came Arthe (2000 for COR), a sofa with joints.Finally, Schneider conceived whole furniture programs such as Team, a series of seven swivelling and cantilevered chairs (for Arts Collection), and the conference ensembles No Limits and High End (for Sedus Stoll). A furn i t u re system that brings the sense of sight into play in a completely new manner is the lighted cabinet EO (2001 for Interlübke) in which the brightness and colour of the illumination can be modified. The round fireplace Emotion (for Skantherm) also has a pleasant surprise in store. It has the first panoramic glass pane that not only radiates heat optimally but also affords a good view of the fire from “all” sides.