Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was a Dutch architect and furniture designer born on June 24, 1888 and died on June 25, 1964. He was a principal member of the Dutch artistic movement “DeStijl”. Rietveld’s most famous design is his “Red and Blue Chair” pictured below.

Rietveld was born in Utrecht Holand, in 1888, the son of a joiner (woodworker). He left school at 11 to be apprenticed under his father and enrolled in night school trying out being a draughtsman and a jeweler in Utrecht. By the time he opened his own furniture workshop in 1917, Rietveld had taught himself the fine art of drawing, painting and model-making. He afterward set up his business as a cabinet-maker.

Rietveld designed his famous Red and Blue Chair in 1917 which has become an iconic piece of modern furniture, featured in many museums. Rietveld wanted his furniture to eventually be mass-produced, rather than handcrafted so he aimed for simplicity in construction. In 1918, he started his furniture factory and changed the chair’s colors after becoming influenced by the primary colors of the ‘De Stijl’ movement, of which he became a member in 1919, that same year he became an architect. The contacts that he made at De Stijl gave him the opportunity to exhibit abroad as well.

Rietveld sitting the first version of what would become the Red and Blue Chair.

Rietveld broke with ‘De Stijl’ in 1928 and became associated with a more functionalist style of architecture, known as either Nieuwe Zakelijkheid or Nieuwe Bouwen. The same year he joined the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. From the late 1920s, he was concerned with social housing, inexpensive production methods, new materials, prefabrication, and standardization. In 1927 Rietveld was already experimenting with prefabricated concrete slabs, a very unusual material at that time. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, it was not until the 1950s that he was able to put his progressive ideas about social housing into practice, in projects in Utrecht and Reeuwijk.

Rietveld designed his famous Zig-Zag Chair in 1934. In 1963 he designed the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam but died a year later, and the building was not completed until 1973.

In 1951 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. In subsequent years he was given many prestigious commissions, including the Dutch pavilion for the Venice Biennale (1953), the art academies in Amsterdam and Arnhem, and the press room for the UNESCO building in Paris. He also designed for the display of small sculptures at the Third International Sculpture Exhibition in Arnhem’s Sonsbeek Park, in Arnhem, Netherlands. Rietveld’s ‘Sonsbeek Pavilion’ was rebuilt at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 1965 and due to irreparable damages caused by decay, was rebuilt for a third time, with new materials, in 2010. In order to handle all these projects, Rietveld set up a partnership with architects Johan van Dillen and J. van Tricht in 1961 and built hundreds of homes, many of them in Utrecht.

The first version of what would become the Red and Blue Chair.

In 1923, Walter Gropius invited Rietveld to exhibit at the Bauhaus. He built, the Rietveld Schröder House, in 1924, in close collaboration with the owner Truus Schröder-Schräder. Built in Utrecht, 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 changing living spaces. The design is like a three-dimensional realization of a gridded Mondrian painting. The house was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2000.Truus Schröder involvement in the Schröder House exerted a strong influence on his daughter, Han Schröder, who became one of the first female architects in the Netherlands.

His work fell out of favor when rationalism came into vogue, but thirty years later he benefited from the revival of 1920’s designs.

Below are some examples of Gerrit Thomas Rietveld’s furniture designs.