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1888 - 1964
Netherlands
The Dutch architect and designer Gerrit Thomas Rietveld left school at the age of eleven to enter his father’s cabinet-making workshop. He joined the De Stijl group in 1918, and in 1924 designed the Schroeder House, Utrecht, which was a perfect concrete expression of the group’s architectural principles.
During the early 1930s Rietveld received several commissions for houses, shops and a cinema. His later works, following a revival of interest in De Stijl in the 1950s, include the Stoop House, Velp (1951), the Soonsbeek sculpture pavilion near Arnhem (1954) and the Ploeg textile factory, Bergeyk (1956).
Although Rietveld began to design chairs in around 1900, his first important design, the Red/Blue chair, was not produced until 1918. Described by van Doesburg as an “abstract-real sculpture,” the Red/Blue chair “was created with the intention of demonstrating that an aesthetic and spatial object could be constructed with linear material and made by machinery.” Its severe, right-angled geometry and use of primary colors make it perfect embodiment of the principles of De Stijl painters - an aesthetic which Rietveld was to develop further in designs such as the Berlin chair of 1923 and the “Military series” of 1923-25.
By 1934, Rietveld’s search for a reductive simplicity had reached its peak in the Zig-Zag chair, an interpretation of the cantilever principle in wood using bolted triangular joints to maintain rigidity.
Throughout his career, Rietveld continued to experiment with unusual naturals and techniques, and his designs include a series of armchairs ranging from the single-sheet aluminum chair of 1942 to the UNESCO chair of 1958, entirely upholstered in foam rubber.
Rietveld drew his inspiration directly from the material, in the manner of a sculptor, rather than drawing up plans at a drawing board. His designs typically combine aesthetic considerations with a desire to fully exploit the advantages of particular materials for economical machine production.
