1966 Grandma’s outmoded household goods are thrown away and the world is once again reinvented. Since progress is now expressed in plastics, all eyes turn toward the chemical industry of Cologne and the yearly Furniture Fair that takes place there. – Two major unconventional thinkers of German design bring Pop Art to the people before it can be seen in Germany in the form of art. Peter Raacke sells his Papp cardboard furniture system in poster-bright colours. Ingo Maurer makes his Bulb lamp into a cult object. – When seating specialist Wilkhahn hires progressive minds from Ulm, the company achieves the status of paragon of “good form”. Others follow suit in the ensuing years, among them Lufthansa, Erco and FSB. – No one wants to make do any longer without a television, refrigerator and washing machine – and a white, Formica-fronted linear kitchen and modular stereo system are likewise musts for the modern home. – The miniskirt liberates the legs. – In the World Cup final at Wembley Stadium, the Germans prove that they can also be gracious losers.

 

1967 Television is now in colour. The message All You Need Is Love goes around the world, live. The Beatles become harbingers of hippiedom and TV marketing. – Arno Votteler designs a container ship utilizing a modular, additive system. – Hans “Nick” Roericht founds an idea factory called Design Research in Ulm.

 

1968 The last edition of Die Schöne Wohnung is bigger and more colourful than ever before, with 250 pages and over 600 illustrations. – An exhibition in Cologne shows Pop Art from the USA for the first time in Germany, a culture shock that forms the lively focus of documenta 4. Pop Art and pop music join forces. New styles now issue from the “underground”. – Plastic furniture changes people’s visual and sitting habits. There are sculptural pieces like Peter Ghyczy’s Gartenei (Garden Egg) or the slick TV-relax by Luigi Colani, as well as ergonomically optimized sitting machines such as the Floris chairs designed by Günter Beltzig and SM 400 by Gerd Lange. – Inflated visions are coupled with strict pragmatism. While Rolf Heide stacks sleeping surfaces on top of each other like industrial pallets in his Stapelliege (Stacked Lounger), Habit introduces the first stackable sofa: the Wohnlandschaft (Lounge Landscape). – Satellite housing developments start to spring up on green fields everywhere. Passing lanes are added to the motorways and pedestrian zones to city centres. Everything seems to fit into the neat grid projected by Ulm. – At the exhibition 50 Years of Bauhaus in Stuttgart, Germany and the rest of the world discover a long-buried past. – The Academy of Design in Ulm closes.

 

1969 Willy Brandt, the first Social Democrat to become Federal Chancellor, wants to venture “more democracy”. – The new Bohemian lifestyle caught up in anti-Vietnam demonstrations and the loose mores of the sexual revolution is showcased in the fiction film Rote Sonne (Red Sun), whoseprotagonists loll about  on mattresses on the floor, but entrust their Beat music records only to a cool record player from Braun. They are not only children of Marx and Afri-Cola, but also fuse the world of shag rugs and plastic furniture into a new kind of counter-culture backdrop. How this new scene can be made commercially profitable is soon demonstrated by stores Magazin and Mawa. The apartment of the film’s female star is furnished with an ultramodern piece of furniture: the Bofinger Chair. – Systematic interior design makes its way into middle-class apartments. The combination cabinets with their roots in classical Modernism are developed further into room-encompassing programs and functional wall units, a process that still continues today, helped along by designers such as Hans Gugelot, Herbert Hirche, Jürgen Lange and Peter Maly. – Burkhard Vogtherr wins the new Bundespreis Gute Form (Federal Award for Good Design) for a new phonograph/TV combination in four cubes. – Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe die in the USA.

 

1970 At the Cologne Furniture Fair, Poggenpohl makes a splash with a spherical kitchen by Luigi Colani: the UFO version of the Frankfurt Kitchen. Going even this kitchen one better is the total interior dubbed Visiona, a psychedelic environment created by Basel-based Danish designer Verner Panton for chemical giant Bayer in the belly of a steamship on the Rhine. – Peter Maly goes out on his own and is taken on board by Leo Lübke as freelance art director at Interlübke, becoming one of the first Germans in the furniture  industry to attain international standing. – Maly is succeeded at Schöner Wohnen by Rolf Heide, who from this post quietly influences West German home design for over two decades through his carefully staged domestic settings. – The plastic door handle 111 opens up a new world of colour. – Egon Eiermann dies in Baden-Baden.

 

1971 The gigantic Wohnlandschaft (Lounge Landscape) with which Rolf Benz makes its debut at the Cologne Furniture Fair is an invitation to sprawl and another innately German furniture innovation. – In a back courtyard in Stuttgart, a mixture of capitalist criticism and idealism gives birth to the business idea for the Magazin stores. – Molldesign by Reiner Moll is the first studio established in Schwäbisch Gmünd, today Germany’s secret design capital in the midst of a region known as an incubator for innovation.

 

1972 Luigi Colani relocates his studio to Harkotten Castle in eastern Westphalia, a stronghold of bathroom and furniture production. – With the Olympic Games in Munich, which for the first time open with a Party of
Nations, Germany launches a campaign aimed at improving its image in the world’s eyes so that it can once again be considered a welcome member of the international community. The campaign’s impresario is Otl Aicher, who for the first time develops a homogeneous national image for this kind of large-scale event. The image campaign ranges from logo and pictograms for the various athletic disciplines, to guideposts and uniforms, all the way to functional furnishings for the accommodations in the Olympic Village, a hive-like monument to concrete building. Many of these elements are simply taken for granted in later, comparable  events, as is the idea of an overall coherent design and the visual communication of a uniform identity – pioneering achievements that put a contemporary face on what Peter Behrens accomplished at the beginning of the century.

 

1973 An Arab oil embargo sets off an “energy crisis” and makes plastic taboo. – The “organic food store” becomes another source of wholesome food products.

 

1974 Swedish furniture maker Ikea opens its first store near Munich, soon followed by many more. The company, whose early expansion largely takes place in Germany, is in the right place at the right time with its inexpensive furniture range. It becomes the supplier of choice for young, unconventional shoppers, alongside Schöner Wohnen the most important arbiter of taste when it comes to home furnishings. – Hansgrohe comes out with a completely newfangled showerhead it dubs Tribel.

 

1975 Herbert Ohl uses net material to create a new kind of chair in his O-Line. – Thanks to the Avantgarde-Kollektion of wallpapers from Rasch, everyone can now surround themselves in Pop Art. – Flötotto’s all-encompassing Profilsystem renders other furniture superfluous.

 

1977 Siegfried Bensinger is appointed interior design chief in the editorial team at Schöner Wohnen, which is still setting trends. The magazine sells its Buch vom Wohnen (Book of the Home) via the coffee store chain Tchibo. – The designer label Mawa comes into being in the back courtyards of Berlin-Kreuzberg. – Left-wing terrorism reaches a climax in the “Deutscher Herbst” (German Autumn).

 

1978 Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas heralds post-modernism. – Stefan Wewerka invents anti-functionalism and combines art with seating. He stubbornly refuses to include any right angles in his three-legged B 1 chair and other equally contorted designs.