Gerrit Rietveld By Mustafa Alali

Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld is a name mostly known for the Red and Blue Chair and the de Stjil movement. He is a Dutch furniture designer and architect. Gerrit Rietveld was influenced by the de Stijl movement. He became a member in this movement in 1919. In 1924 he designed his first building, the Rietveld Schroder House. He was the first to implement De stijl esthetic program in a visible form. However, Gerrit Rietveld actually designed a number of innovative pieces of furniture, housing, public institutions and projects such as the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This research talk about Gerrit Rietveld , his life, ideology, De Stjil movement, and some of his most popular designs.



Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888-1964) was born and lived most of his life in Utrecht. His father was a cabinetmaker and Rietveld inherited the carpentry from his father. He started working with his father when he was 12 years old. He wanted to be an artist. He attended evening classes in painting, drawing, clay modeling. However, he had to put off the idea of being a professional painter for economic reasons. He had to work with his father until 1917 when he became an independent furniture-maker and designer. The principle that the design and architectures were more useful in a social context than fine art has played a role in his decision to be a designer rather than an artist(Encyclopedia of World Biography).



De Stijl movement

De Stijl from the Dutch for “the Style” was a Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917. De Stijl is also a journal which was published by the Dutch painter and designer Theo van Doesburg in 1917. This magazine promotes a new visualization of the arts. While the magazine itself never sold more than about three hundred copies, De Stijl was the Netherlands’ most influential contribution to the international modernist movement. De Stijl called for simplicity and objectivity and rejected figuration and narrative. Elements of pure form and colors are used to build an ideal “model” for a new world through furniture, sculpture, interior design and architecture. They used the rectangles and squares in primary colors to achieve abstract objectivity(Art and Culture).

The group’s principle members were the painters Piet Mondrian, Vilmos Huszar, Bart van der Leck, the architects Gerrit Rietveld, Robert Van’t Hoff, and J.J.P. Oud. Their philosophy known as Nieuwe Beelding, expresses a new utopian model of spiritual harmony and order. They support pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the basics of form and colors, in other words, they simplified visual. The foundation of this movement is in a period of First World War and we can see the style is reflected here where people wanted peace, rest, and harmony. The member tried to reflect in their work “The Ideal Harmony” what in the entire social development could not be accomplished.




The De Stijl ended when Theo van Doesburg started a new alliance called “Abstraction-Creation” so he ended his membership with The Style which led to the end of the magazine. However, the movement did not end up completely. Members continued their work but on individual basis rather than as a group. The De Stijl was a significant movement that it still inspires the art and architecture. It is reflected in Western countries everywhere, in clothes carpets, furniture, and architecture. People recognized and copied the principals of the De Stijl or at least were influenced by it.




As mentioned above Rietveld was involved with De Stijl from 1919 to 1931. The Red Blue Chair and Rietveld Schröder House are clear examples of how Rietveld is influenced by De Stijl. Rietveld furniture is often judged as an effort to “reinvent the wheel”, in other words, starts from the beginning.. It is concerned with the idea of evolving new types for new methods of production. He tried to design furniture than can be made in large quantities. Some of his designs were produced both by hands and machine methods The Zig-zag chair is an example of hand-made furniture. His ideology is to design furniture which could be mass produced and inexpensive for everyone. From a social standpoint he desired to relieve the laborer from the boredom of tough work and repetitive work by making machines perform some of the work. It is easy to assemble the Red Blue chair that people do not need help of any kind of working drawings. The bars are pegged together and the seat and back are stable to the frame with simple screws(Overty Paul).

Red Blue Chair


In 1918, Rietveld designed a chair, which influenced furniture design as well as the history of architecture. This chair is known as the Red Blue chair. Rietveld worked with his father as a cabinet maker. He learned the mythology and skills joining together different pieces of wood dovetail joints so that a completed chair would appear to be carved from a single block without a glitch. However, in his own experimental furniture, Rietveld intended for a very diverse result. He wanted the elements of a piece to remain independent, visually discrete. He created his own style “Rietveld joint” in which each section of wood extended a few centimeters past its point of juncture with another, thus highlighting the separateness of each piece inside the general structure(Overty Paul).

According to Anthony C. Romeo, there is a criticism in this chair- the Red Blue Chair- of how people see comfort. Most people think of a comfort chair as one you can sink into, one that will engulf you in reassuring arms. In the Red Blue chair you lean back not into a cushion but a bright red rectangle and you will sit on a blue rectangle. The black arms and legs visually disappear against a dark background, and the red and blue rectangles almost seem to be floating in space, visually vibrating above the black area(Anthony C. Romeo).



Rietveld Schröder House(1924)


The Rietveld Schröder House was built in 1924 in Utrecht, Netherlands. It was built as a private resident. The house is implemented in accordance with the philosophy of the “De Stijl movement. Rietveld designed this house for and together with Mrs. T Schröder. The visual feature of the house are characterize by abstraction, straight lines, glass planes and metal pipes as well as by the color white, grey, and black and the application of the three primary colors. The planes and lines cross and transect each other so that the indoor and outdoor spaces appear to flow into each other. The internal of the house is incorporated in and synchronized with the exterior, therefore shaping a collective work of art. A notable attribute in this house is the sliding walls on the second floor that can be placed in several arrangements. The spatial design can in this manner be altered from one large shared living room for the family into quite a few rooms for a more personal atmosphere. The resident has to make a transaction for each activity; by opening out a wall, the bathroom is created, whereas the sleeping area could be screen off with sliding walls, and by placing shutters in front of the windows, privacy was achieved. The house is precisely a machine for living in (Rietveldschroderhuis).




The House Today

The Rietveld Schröder House is the only house to be designed in accordance to the ideology of De Stijl. The house dates from 1924 and has since been the subject of many discussions. It was and still is an model and reference for numerous architects and interior designer from across the world. Its restoration based on the original designs and photographs has contributed substantially to the preservation of its qualities. Some vital, constructive development have been implemented. For example, cracks in the brickwork needed to be fixed and rotten ironwork was replaced. The roofing has been substituted with more current material that is better suitable to survive climate conditions. Elements that were lost or modified over the course of time have been reintroduced into the interior, most of them in their original form. Through this approach, the house can be acknowledged to this very day as being the incredibly design that was realized by Rietveld and T. Schröder in 1924.

Gerrit Rietveld lived and worked in Utrecht the entire of his life. His designs were publish for the first time in the De Stijl journal in 1919. Theo van Doesburg was the source of power behind the Stijl movement. De Stijl matured into one of the main avant-grade style of the 20th century. After the Schröder House was completed, Rietveld became associated with the Nieuwe Bouwen and his style turn into more functionalist. He built 934 homes in Utrecht in a period of about forty years. Today the Rietveld collection of the central Museum and Rietveld’s building projects in Utrecht are the destination of numerous fans of art and architecture globally (Rietveldschroderhuis).

As mentioned before Gerrit Rietveld actually designed a number of innovative pieces of furniture, housing, public institutions and projects. Here are some pictures of designs made by Gerrit Rietveld.




Bibliography

Rietveldschroderhuis,(2008). Schroder House. Retrieved July 2 6, 2009 from http://www.rietveldschroderhuis.nl/rshEng.jsp

Anthony C. Romeo,(2002) GERRIT RIETVELD'S RED AND BLUE CHAIR & What I Learned about Rest and Motion in Myself. Retrieved August 5,2009 from http://www.terraingallery.org/Anthony-Romeo-Chair.html

"Rietveld, Gerrit Thomas (1888-1964)." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Thomson Gale, 1998. NA. Academic OneFile. Gale. University of Arizona Library. 8 Aug. 2009
http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/itx/start.do?prodId=AONE

Overty Paul. "Equipment for utopia." Art in America 82.n1 (Jan 1994): 34(8). Academic OneFile. Gale. University of Arizona Library. 8 Aug. 2009
http://find.galegroup.com.ezproxy1.library.arizona.edu/itx/start.do?prodId=AONE

Art and Culture(2009). De Stijl . Retrieved August 8, 2009 from http://www.artandculture.com/categories/650-de-stijl#more