Gerrit Rietveld

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(b Utrecht, 24 June 1888; d Utrecht, 25 June 1964). Dutch architect and furniture designer. He started work in his father's furniture workshop at the age of 12, and then from 1906 to 1911 he worked as a draughtsman for C. J. Begeer, a jeweller in Utrecht. During 1904-8 he took evening classes in drawing and the study of ornamentation at the Kunstindustrieel Onderwijs der Vereeniging of the Museum van Kunstnijverheid in Utrecht. His interests nevertheless extended further than the applied arts. Around 1906 he attended classes given by the architect P. J. C. Klaarhamer (1874-1954), a like-minded contemporary of H. P. Berlage. This contact with Klaarhamer, who at that time shared a studio with Bart van der Leck, was of great importance for Rietveld's development, for it was through them that he learnt of recent national and international trends in architecture and the applied arts.

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Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888-1964), architect and furniture designer, was a member of the group of Dutch artists and architects known as de Stijl. He was the first to give its esthetic program visible form.

Gerrit Rietveld was born on June 24, 1888, in Utrecht and lived there most of his life. He was trained as a cabinetmaker by his father (1899-1906) and as a jewelry designer in the studio of C. J. Begeer (1906-1911). For the next 8 years he was self-employed as a cabinetmaker while studying and working with the architect P. J. Klaarhamer. Rietveld's career as an independent architect began in 1919.

A commission to copy from photographs furniture designed by the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright for a client of the Dutch architect Robert van't Hoff brought Rietveld into contact with de Stijl (the Style), founded in 1917. De Stijl advocated a "pure" artistic expression based upon the interrelationship in space of rectangles of primary colors. Rietveld was a member of this group from 1919 to 1931, but already in 1917-1918 he had designed the so-called Red-Blue chair. Composed of a modular grid of square or rectangular sticks painted black and with a sustaining seat and back of red and blue rectangular plywood planes, this design enabled each element to maintain its own absolute identity because of the color scheme and the joinery. It was the first executed object to exhibit the artistic principles of de Stijl.

Rietveld applied the same interplay of rectangles to an architectural design in his remodeling of the groundfloor shop front of the G. & Z. C. Jewelry Store, Amsterdam (1920; destroyed). In 1921 he began a period of collaboration with the designer Truus Schröder-Schräder, for and with whom he designed the paradigm of de Stijl architecture, the Schröder House, Utrecht (1924). The flexible design of the two-story house included an upper floor which could be made into one large room by sliding back the movable partitions. Its interior extended out into the surroundings through balconies, corner casement windows, projecting floor and roof planes, and large areas of glass. The exterior was a de Stijl composition of particolored, stuccoed brick planes and painted steel stanchions that suggested an inner volume dynamically defined by discrete lines and planes, but not actually enclosed. It set the standard for the progressive architecture of the 1920s in Europe.

De Stijl principles also formed the series of designs for shop fronts (1924-1929) which, with large-scale housing projects, comprised the bulk of Rietveld's work of the late 1920s. The only one exceptional design from this period was a garage and chauffeur's quarters in Utrecht (1927-1928; now altered). Here his concern was as much for technique as for form. He used precast concrete slabs held in place by a frame of steel I-sections expressed as a de Stijl grid on the exterior. In 1928 Rietveld was one of the co-founders of the CIAM (International Congress of Modern Architecture).

By the 1930s Rietveld's time seemed to have passed. Commissions became fewer, although he continued to design furniture (Zig-Zag chair, 1934) and buildings. Most of the latter were country houses displaying the canonical white stucco cubes, large areas of glass, and flexible, open planning of the mature International Style in Europe (Hillebrandt House, The Hague, 1935). With renewed interest in de Stijl following World War II, Rietveld continued to design private houses (Stoop House, Velp, 1951) and again received important commissions, including the Hoograven Housing complex, Utrecht (1954-1957), the Jaarbeurs, Utrecht (1956), and the De Ploeg textile factory, Bergeyk (1956). He died in Utrecht on June 25, 1964.

Further Reading

The only monograph on Rietveld is Theodore M. Brown, The Work of G. Rietveld (1958), which includes an illustrated catalog of Rietveld's work, a bibliography, and translations of some of his writings. Hans Ludwig C. Jaffé, De Stijl (1960), discusses Rietveld's connection with the group.

A leading exponent of the De Stijl movement, Dutch architect and designer Rietveld is most widely known for his Red and Blue Chair of 1918 and the remarkable Schröder House, Utrecht, of 1924, the latter a complete visual embodiment of the De Stijl-built environment. Originally trained as a cabinetmaker in his father's workshop from 1899 to 1906, followed by a period as a draughtsman for a jeweller, he began his own cabinetmaking business in Utrecht in 1911 and studied architecture under P. J. Klaarhamer. He joined the De Stijl group in 1919 after his Red and Blue Chair had featured in the periodical De Stijl. Reduced to basic geometric elements showing the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Arts and Crafts and rendered in primary colours that owed much to the aesthetic philosophy of the Dutch painter Piet Mondrian, the chair subsequently became a 20th-century design icon. It was later reissued by Cassina, who had bought up all the rights to Rietveld's designs in 1971. He also set up an independent architectural practice in 1919.

Rietveld was a prominent member of the avant-garde in the 1920s and was in contact with leading designers of the period, including the Russian Constructivist El Lissitsky. Underlining such progressive links was his inclusion in the 1923 Weimar Bauhaus exhibition where his Berlin chair and an innovative lighting design in Walter Gropius' office were shown. He was also a founding member of the CIAM ( Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) in 1928 and was included in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Recent European Architecture show of 1931. His 1924 Schröder House in Utrecht, a design solution arrived at in conjunction with his client Truus Schröder-Schräder, was perhaps his most complete realization of the De Stijl philosophy with an integration of architectural form, interior design, furniture, and fittings. In the previous year Metz & Co., the Amsterdam department store, issued the mass-produced version of his 1927 Beugel Stool in moulded plywood. This was followed up in 1934 with his ‘z-shaped’ Zig-Zag chair and, in 1935, a home assembly Crate chair made from packing case wood, an economic design that incurred strong criticism from the furniture trade. In the same year he also designed an upholstered armchair. In the 1940s and 1950s he continued to produce experimental furniture designs using metal and plywood, a number of his plywood designs being influenced by the work of Charles and Ray Eames. In the latter years of his career he devoted increasing attention to architecture, establishing a partnership with J. Van Dillen and J. Van Tricht in 1961.

Dutch designer and important De Stijl architect. He designed several items of furniture in which the elements of the structure were unequivocally expressed (e.g. the Red-Blue Chair (1918) ). From 1921 he began to work with the designer, Mrs Truus (G. A.) Schröder-Schräder (1889–1985), on the planning of the celebrated Schröder House, Prins Hendriklaan, Utrecht (completed 1924), in which De Stijl principles were applied to architecture for the first time: with its adaptable interior spaces, removable partitions, asymmetry, white slabs, and large areas of glass it became a paradigm of International Modernism. Like his furniture, the house seems to be put together from pieces of card-like elements, with planes overlapping, but it is constructed almost entirely of traditional materials, and expressed its ‘modernity’ largely by metaphor. He also designed terrace-houses, Erasmuslaan (1934), and the Vreeburg Cinema (1936), both in Utrecht. With others he designed the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam (1963–72). He was a founder-member of CIAM.

Bibliography

• T. Brown (1958)
• Buffinga (1971)
• G. Fanelli (1968)
• Jaffé (1956)
• Küper & Zijl (eds.) (1992)
• Mulder & Zijl (1999)
• Overy (1969)
• Overy et al. (1988)
• Placzek (ed.) (1982)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Gerrit Rietveld
Born	Gerrit Thomas Rietveld 24 June 1888(1888-06-24) Utrecht, Netherlands
Died	26 June 1964 (aged 76) Utrecht, Netherlands
Resting place	Soestbergen Cemetery Utrecht, Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch
Occupation	Furniture designer, architect
Known for	Red and Blue Chair (1917) Schröder House (1924)

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (25 June 1888–27 June, 1965) was a Dutch furniture designer and architect. One of the principal members of the Dutch artistic movement called De Stijl, Rietveld is famous for his Red and Blue Chair and for the Rietveld Schröder House, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Rietveld designed his famous Red and Blue Chair in 1917. In 1918, he started his own furniture factory, and changed the chair's colors after becoming influenced by the 'De Stijl' movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year in which he became an architect. He designed his first building, the Rietveld Schröder House, in 1924, in close collaboration with the owner Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck. Built in Utrecht on the Prins Hendriklaan 50, the house has a conventional ground floor, but is radical on the top floor, lacking fixed walls but instead relying on sliding walls to create and change living spaces. The design seems like a three-dimensional realisation of a Mondrian painting. The house is a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000.

Rietveld broke with the 'De Stijl' in 1928 and became associated with a more functionalist style of architecture known as either Nieuwe Zakelijkheid or Nieuwe Bouwen. The same year he joined the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. He designed the "Zig-Zag" chair[1] in 1934 and started the design of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was finished after his death. He built hundreds of homes, many of which in the city of Utrecht.

Red and Blue Chair (1917)

Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht (1924)

Metz & Co. in The Hague

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Gerrit Rietveld

• Rietveld at the Centraal Museum Utrecht
• www.ModernFurnitureClassics.com Rietveld Bio
• Great Buildings Online

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