RIETVELD
1888 – 1964
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was born in Utrecht, Holland in 1888. His first work was in his father’s wood carving shop; later he became an apprentice in a jewelry workshop. In 1911 he opened a separate
workshop and studied architecture in the evenings.
In 1917 he designed the famous “red-blue” chair, which highlighted the use of color in a daring breakdown of the structural elements into pure geometric planes, constituting a proposal of architectural language that reveals an evident affinity with the research of the De Stijl group, which the artist joined in 1919.
From a technical perspective Rietveld’s furniture presented new constructions that had practically nothing in common with the achievements of traditional carpentry and whose structure as well as colors had to be seen from the perspective of their “manifest” function.
De Stijl pieces were based on certain theoretic-artistic considerations; many projects would still have allowed a mechanical production. De Stijl style, developed by the painter Mondrian from early concepts of Cubism, was linked to a rigid geometric order. The basic De Stijl form is the cube. The Schroeder house by Rietveld was built with a rigorous observance of De Stijl principles: the basic form is the cube, perimeter walls are made mostly of glass so that interior and exterior spaces constitute a whole with moveable interior walls.
In contact with the experience of Mondrian and Van Doesburg, Rietveld’s contribution was fundamental for the poetry of Neoplasticism in the field of architecture: with unitary processes, the abstract purity of his furniture in fact transformed into architectural dimensions. Rietveld’s style is expressed in the geometric modulation of space, obtained by scanning the planes on which the different primary colors (black, red, yellow, blue and white) would
operate. Faithful to the principles of Neoplasticism until 1930, Rietveld then approached the themes of Rationalism, especially in terms of searching for modularity, even though his creative energy appears to have decreased after the most important productivity of this period, such as the terraced houses of Vienna. The last designs for residential and commercial and administrative buildings made possible for aesthetic principles to continue into the 1950s, in contrast with the expansion of rationalism.
He died in 1964.
