Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld is the most prolific architect associated with De Stijl movement and beyond.

Below is the description of Gerrit Rietveld in the Den Haagse Gemeente Museum:

"Gerrit Rietveld   1888 Utrecht - Utrecht 1964

"A young dreamer, Gerrit Rietveld trained as a furniture maker in his father's workshop, simply for his own pleasure (he would later call this healthy egocentricity).  He abandoned the strict Protestant creed of his youth.  Henceforth, he would no longer regard the material as bad and only the spiritual as good.  In 1918 he exchanged his father's dowel hole joinery for joints that remained visible in the final product.  He helped Van Doesburg and J.J.P. Our in their attempts to give the traditional interior a new, spatial design, and went on the become an ingenious interior designer himself.  In 1924 he reinvented architecture when, in collaboration with Truus Schroeder, he designed and built a house in Utrecht.  Rietveld broke off relations with Van Doesburg in 1928 and aligned himself with architects who were aiming for a strictly functional form of architecture.  In 1951 he designed the De Stijl exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and did a great deal to spread De Stijl ideas in Dutch interior design."

Label from The Hague Gemeente Museum

 The Utrecht Centraal Museum displays a collection of the famous 'Red-Blue Chair'.
There are many variations over the decades.  The first appeared in 1919; it is still being produced by Cassina.   Here is what guide De Stijl in the Netherlands says about it:
"Like Rembrandt's The Night Watch and Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Rietveld's Red-Blue Chair is on an official list (The Canon of Nederland) of fifty objects and people who together summarize the history of the Netherlands.  Its basic forms, its sense of space, the easy-to-read construction and the 'Rietveld joint' make this chair the most consummate material expression of the ideas of De Stijl."
  Below, the Rietveld Schroeder House which is described further in the next section.

The Chaffeur's House in Utrecht, above on the left, from 1927-28.

Three houses from De Bilt outside Utrecht designed in 1958 by Rietveld.


Here is what a recent Wright auction catalog says about Gerrit Rietveld:

"Gerrit Rietveld was a celebrated designer and architect, famous for bringing the principles of the De Stijl Movement to these disciplines.  Rietveld was born in 1888 in Utrecht to a family of cabinetmakers and later studied drafting and architecture.

Rietveld opened his own furniture studio in 1917 and soon after became involved with the De Stijl Movement.  In 1918, he designed his now famous Red-Blue Chair, which was heralded as a distillation of the movement's emphasis on geometry, primary colors and an objective language of forms.  He regarded this chair, and others he would design, as 'spatial creations,' rather than simply furniture. 
  The Schroeder House in Utrecht, designed by Rietveld in 1924, is regarded as the architectural embodiment of the ideals of De Stijl and his most important work.  In 1928, Rietveld distanced himself from De Stijl and became concerned with the challenges of affordable housing.  He was a visionary in designing prefabricated and standardized buildings, which the architectural world would not consider more seriously until the 1950's."