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Gerrit Rietveld was born in
Utrecht, Netherlands and lived and worked there all his life. Gerrit learned first cabinet
making from his father. After leaving the family workshop in 1911, he trained as an
architectural draftsman, before he became finally an architect in 1919. Rietveld's most
important architectural work, the Schroder House in Utrecht (1924), correlates closely
with his furniture designs. Its rigorous geometries and open-plan layout, articulated with
screens and panels of color, form a new, so called modernist, aesthetic. |
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The famous Red & Blue chair was designed
in 1917. Nothing has existed like that before. It marked the transition between the
organic, curving Art Noveau Style and the crisp, chic Art Deco. The Red & Blue chair
is composed out of a dramatic interplay of straight lines to form patterns. The lines
produce form by enclosing space, the structure has very simple components and the striking
colors are a reminder of paintings by the artist Mondrian. Although there is no
upholstery, the chair is amazingly comfortable. |
Red & Blue Chair |
De Stijl
G. Rietveld joined in Dutch Modernist Design Movement, De Stijl, around the time he
created the Red & Blue Chair. The Chair summarizes kind of the radical proposals of
this influential art and design movement. It promoted simple forms and primary colors and
tried to reduce objects to their essential form. |
Like the Red & Blue Chair, the ZigZag was created in 1934 as a way of articulating
space. Rietveld wanted to design a chair from a single piece of material. Although it
could not be realized with wood, the chair gives at least the impression as of. The ZigZag
is made of four rectangular sections of natural hardwood, intricately dovetailed, glued
and bolted together that reveals Gerrits expertise in cabinet making. The chair is a pure
statement of modernist seating and expresses the cantilever principle in a clear form. It
is spare, austere and reveals a simplicity in abstraction.
by Klaus
Labuttis
www.famous-classics.com
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ZigZag Chair |
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