Gerrit Rietveld was a Dutch architect and furniture designer and one of the main protagonists of the De Stijl movement. He gained recognition worldwide with his Red and Blue Chair, his Zig Zag Chair, and the Rietveld Schröder House he designed in Utrecht.
Gerrit Rietveld: a biography
Gerrit Rietveld was born in 1888 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His father was a carpenter, and between 1906 and 1911, Rietveld worked as a draughtsman for the silversmith C.J. Begeer. In 1917, Rietveld began working independently as a carpenter, and it was just a year later that he designed the Red Blue Chair. He strove for simplicity in the chair’s design, as he intended it to eventually be mass-produced. In the same year, Rietveld opened his own furniture workshop, and simultaneously became interested in the artistic ideas of the De Stijl movement. He became a member of the group in 1919 and began to focus his thinking on architecture.
In 1923, Walter Gropius invited Gerrit Rietveld to attend an exhibition at the Bauhaus school in Weimar. In 1924, Rietveld completed the Rietveld Schröder House. He collaborated intensely with the house's owner, the interior designer Truus Schröder-Schräder, who commissioned him to design a dwelling without walls for herself and her children. By the end of the 1920s, Rietveld had moved on to designing social housing, using inexpensive production methods and new materials based on the principals of prefabrication and standardisation. He designed the popular Zig Zag Chair in 1934 and began work on the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. In 1958, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht hosted the first retrospective of his work, and in 1964 Rietveld died.
The Red Blue Chair
The Red and Blue Chair was designed by Rietveld in 1917. Originally, the chair was made from stained wood. From 1923 onward, the chair was produced using the primary colours red, yellow, and blue together with black, all of which featured heavily in the work of the De Stijl movement, most notably in the art of Piet Mondrian. Rietveld's Red Blue Chair is composed of vertical and horizontal planes, supported by orthogonally placed black struts, in many ways inspired by the work of fellow De Stijl member Mondrian. The chair is still in production today and is made by Cassina.
The Rietveld Schröder House
The Rietveld Schröder House presented a completely new conception of the relationship between architectural interior and exterior, presented as an asymmetrical composition of white and grey planes supported by black columns and beams. The building is marked by a gradual transition from inside to outside, and by its flexible, folding walls that enable multiple ways of using the first-floor living area and the Rietveld furniture specially designed for it. The house is arguably the only true piece of De Stijl architecture ever realised. Mrs. Schröder-Schräder lived in the house until her death in 1985, and the building has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2000.
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