Gerrit Rietveld
Gerrit Rietveld was a cabinetmaker who became an architect. His Red Blue Chair and the Schröder House in Utrecht are the best-known works of De Stijl, in which planes, lines and primary colours turn everyday life into art.
Gerrit Rietveld was born in 1888 in Utrecht, the son of a cabinetmaker, and worked in his father’s workshop from the age of eleven. He took evening classes in drawing and architecture and opened his own furniture workshop in 1917. That year or the next he made the first version of the chair that later became the Red Blue Chair. He came into contact with the group De Stijl, with Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, who sought to create a new art of straight lines and primary colours.
Rietveld’s chair was painted red, blue, yellow and black and became a symbol of De Stijl. His great breakthrough as an architect was the Schröder House in Utrecht, which he built in 1924 together with Truus Schröder-Schräder. He also designed the zigzag-shaped Zig-Zag Chair, housing in Utrecht and Vienna and in the 1950s the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. His last major work, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, was completed after his death.
Rietveld died in 1964 in Utrecht, in the Schröder House, where he lived in his last years. He is regarded as one of the most important Dutch architects and designers of the 20th century. The Schröder House became a World Heritage Site in 2000, and his furniture is still made. His work shows how a joiner’s feeling for material and construction could be united with the ideas of the avant-garde.