Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld (1888 -1964) - Defining New Forms in Wood

by Klaus Labuttis of www.famous-classics.com

Gerrit Rietveld was born in Utrecht, Netherlands and lived and worked there all his life. Gerrit learned first cabinet making from his father. After leaving the family workshop in 1911, he trained as an architectural draftsman, before he became finally an architect in 1919. Rietveld's most important architectural work, the Schroder House in Utrecht (1924), correlates closely with his furniture designs. Its rigorous geometries and open-plan layout, articulated with screens and panels of color, form a new, so called modernist, aesthetic.

The famous Red & Blue chair was designed in 1917. Nothing has existed like that before. It marked the transition between the organic, curving Art Noveau Style and the crisp, chic Art Deco. The Red & Blue chair is composed out of a dramatic interplay of straight lines to form patterns. The lines produce form by enclosing space, the structure has very simple components and the striking colors are a reminder of paintings by the artist Mondrian. Although there is no upholstery, the chair is amazingly comfortable.

De Stijl

G. Rietveld joined in Dutch Modernist Design Movement, De Stijl, around the time he created the Red & Blue Chair. The Chair summarizes kind of the radical proposals of this influential art and design movement. It promoted simple forms and primary colors and tried to reduce objects to their essential form.

Like the Red & Blue Chair, the ZigZag was created in 1934 as a way of articulating space. Rietveld wanted to design a chair from a single piece of material. Although it could not be realized with wood, the chair gives at least the impression as of. The ZigZag is made of four rectangular sections of natural hardwood, intricately dovetailed, glued and bolted together that reveals Gerrits expertise in cabinet making. The chair is a pure statement of modernist seating and expresses the cantilever principle in a clear form. It is spare, austere and reveals a simplicity in abstraction.

Source: http://www.dezignare.com/newsletter/gerrit-rietveld.html