Gerrit rietveld chair

Dutch furniture designer and architect

Gerrit Rietveld
Rietveld in
Born	Gerrit Thomas Rietveld 24 June Utrecht, Netherlands
Died	25 June () (aged&#;76) Utrecht, Netherlands
Occupation(s)	Furniture designer and architect

Gerrit Rietveld (24 June – 25 June ) was a Dutch furniture designer and architect.

Early life

Rietveld was born in Utrecht on 24 June as the son of a joiner. He left school at 11 to be apprenticed to his father and enrolled at night school^[1] before working as a draughtsman for C. J. Begeer, a jeweller in Utrecht, from to ^[2]

De Stijl

By the time he opened his own furniture workshop in , Rietveld had taught himself drawing, painting and model-making.

He afterwards set up in business as a cabinet-maker.^[3]

Rietveld designed his Red and Blue Chair in which has become an iconic piece of modern furniture.

Write short biography Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was born in Utrecht on June 24, , the second of six children of furniture maker Johannes Cornelis Rietveld and Elisabeth van der Horst It was a stern reformed family. What my mother thought was the best and most beautiful thing in life, my father thought was bad and sinful. We were brought up with the duty to do good and disregard evil, everything material was low and bad and the spiritual was high and good. In , when he was 11 years old, he became an apprentice to his father in the furniture workshop.

Hoping that much of his furniture would eventually be mass-produced rather than handcrafted, Rietveld aimed for simplicity in construction.^[4] In , he started his own furniture factory, and changed the chair's colours after becoming influenced by the De Stijl movement, of which he became a member in , the same year in which he became an architect.

The contacts that he made at De Stijl gave him the opportunity to exhibit abroad as well. In , Walter Gropius invited Rietveld to exhibit at the Bauhaus.^[5]

He built the Rietveld Schröder House, in , in close collaboration with the owner Truus Schröder-Schräder. Built in Utrecht on the Prins Hendriklaan 50, the house has a conventional ground floor, but is radical on the top floor, lacking fixed walls but instead relying on sliding walls to create and change living spaces.

The house has been a UNESCOWorld Heritage Site since His involvement in the Schröder House exerted a strong influence on Truus' daughter, Han Schröder, who became one of the first female architects in the Netherlands.^[6]

Nieuwe Zakelijkheid

Rietveld broke with De Stijl in and became associated with a more functionalist style of architecture, known as either Nieuwe Zakelijkheid or Nieuwe Bouwen.

Gerrit rietveld furniture

Gerrit rietveld nationality

Gerrit rietveld school

Gerrit rietveld designs

Gerrit rietveld death

The same year he joined the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne. From the late s he was concerned with social housing, inexpensive production methods, new materials, prefabrication and standardisation. In he was already experimenting with prefabricated concrete slabs, a very unusual material at that time. In the s and s, however, all his commissions came from private individuals, and it was not until the s that he was able to put his progressive ideas about social housing into practice, in projects in Utrecht and Reeuwijk.^[7]

Rietveld designed the Zig-Zag Chair in and started the design of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was finished after his death.

De Stijl revival

In Rietveld designed a retrospective exhibition about De Stijl which was held in Amsterdam, Venice and New York. Interest in his work revived as a result.

Gerrit rietveld short biography In his early life, he trained as a cabinetmaker under his father between and Later, he studied as a jewelry designer in the studio of C. Begeer from to Rietveld died on June 25, , in Utrecht. To further elaborate on the latter, the house is a family-sized habitation, built to emphasize a geometric balance between the individual shapes.

In subsequent years he was given many commissions, including the Dutch pavilion for the Venice Biennale (), the art academies in Amsterdam and Arnhem, and the press room for the UNESCO building in Paris. Designed for the display of small sculptures at the Third International Sculpture Exhibition in Arnhem's Sonsbeek Park in , Rietveld's 'Sonsbeek Pavilion' was rebuilt at the Kröller-Müller Museum in ^[8] Due to irreparable damages caused by regular decay, it was once again rebuilt, this time with new materials, in In order to handle all these projects, in Rietveld set up a partnership with the architects Johan van Dillen and J.

van Tricht built hundreds of homes, many of them in the city of Utrecht.^[7]

His work was neglected when rationalism came into vogue, but he later benefited from a revival of the style of the s thirty years later.^[3]

Death

Rietveld died on 25 June in Utrecht.

His son Wim Rietveld also became a renowned industrial designer.

Recognition

Rietveld had his first retrospective exhibition devoted to his architectural work at the Central Museum, Utrecht, in When the art academy in Amsterdam became part of the higher professional education system in and was given the status of an Academy for Fine Arts and Design, the name was changed to the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in honour of Rietveld.^[9] "Gerrit Rietveld: A Centenary Exhibition" at the Barry Friedman Gallery, New York, in was the first comprehensive presentation of the Dutch architect's original works ever held in the U.S.

The highlight of a celebratory "Rietveld Year" in Utrecht, the exhibition "Rietveld's Universe" opened at the Centraal Museum and compared him and his work with famous contemporaries like Wright, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe.^[10]

Two software tools, both for code review, have been named after Gerrit Rietveld: Gerrit and Rietveld.

References

External links