Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was born in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1888. He worked in his fathers’ carpentry business and was a trainee at a jewellery studio. Then, in 1911 he started his own cabinet-making firm, lasting 8 years. During this era he studied architecture. Through his studies he became familiar with several founders of De Stijl. These were cubist artists who restricted their style to using straight black lines, right angles and primary colours.  You can see this influence on his designs of chairs. I have included a painting by Piet Mondriaan as an example of the kind of work of the De Stijl movement.

In 1917 Rietveld designed the ‘Red Blue Chair’, which indicated a drastic change in architectural theory. His different, odd furniture designs led to quite a few housing tasks which he always designed in a Neo-plastic style. The designs developed the free and changeable use of space and showed a deep understanding of ‘dynamic spatial ideas’.

In the late 1920s architecture in the Netherlands focused on the idea of "dematerialization". This idea influenced a series of terrace houses which Rietveld was involved. In 1928 Rietveld acted as a founding member of CIAM.

In the years of the 1930s and 1940s Rietveld, with a few exceptions, found that work was not particularly productive. Between 1942 and 1948, Rietveld taught at several institutions in the Netherlands. In 1963 he was elected an honorary member of the Bond van Nederlandse Architecten and in 1964 he received an honorary degree from the Technische Hochschule in Delft.

Rietveld died in Utrecht in 1964.