Equipment for utopia - furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld, Hessenhuis, Antwerp, Belgium

Art in America, Jan, 1994 by Overty Paul

Rietveld's intention in these early pieces was to reduce his furniture to its basic components, each of which he attempted to make as simple as possible. He wanted his furniture to have little mass and volume; instead of using forms that enclosed space, he designed open forms through which space could move freely. Furthermore, he was interested in furniture that would not be laborious to produce, that would not require repetitious machine work or tedious hand work. The Red Blue Chair, for example, is composed of easily standardized parts: two boards for the seat and back, two struts for the arms, and seven rails and six posts for the frame. The rails and posts are connected by simple dowels and the boards are joined to the frame by nails.

It is known that when Rietveld began work on his experimental pieces, he was also just beginning to question the certainties of his Calvinist upbringing,(12) and the two developments were perhaps not unrelated. As his conventional beliefs unraveled, he was producing designs that can be seen as "deconstructions" of the traditional methods of furniture-making he had learned as a boy in his father's workshop. Rietveld's father and his assistants produced furniture in Louis XV and SVI or Dutch Renaissance styles, and a particular specialty of the workshop was walnut furniture inlaid with ebony. Among the basic cabinet-making skills that Rietveld learned was the method of seamlessly joining together different pieces of wood by mortise and tenon or dovetail joints so that a finished chair or buffet would appear to be carved from a single block.(13)

In his own experimental furniture, however, Rietveld aimed for a very different effect. He wanted the elements of a piece to remain independent, visually discrete. His method--apparently quite original--was the "Rietveld joint," in which each section of wood extended a few centimeters past its point of juncture with another, thus emphasizing the separateness of each within the overall structure.(14) Though early pieces like the Red Blue Chair, the Child's High Chair and the Buffet were once considered to be completely new in their reductive simplification, critics now recognize that there were antecedents or parallels for Rietveld's stripped-down look in furniture by Frank Lloyd Wright, H.P. Berlage and P.J.C. Klaarhamer. Nevertheless, the Red Blue and High Back Chairs are often thought of as transitional works in the history of furniture. As deconstructions of the traditional overstuffed armchair, they can be seen as predecessors of the machine-produced, standardized, tubular steel chairs that began appearing in the late 1920s--of which Rietveld himself designed a number of examples.(15)

Though Rietveld's early furniture was not designed to be manufactured in quantity, the Red Blue Chair as well as other pieces from that period were produced more widely at the beginning of the 1920s than was once thought. Around 1923, they seem to have been batch-produced in a factory and sold relatively cheaply. A price list from about that date, probably for a model room in an exhibition, includes both a cheaper and a more expensive version of the Red Blue Chair. The latter, in better quality wood, would presumably have been made in Rietveld's own workshop.(16) The clientele for this furniture was mainly drawn from a circle of younger, forward-looking, modernizing professionals of Rietveld's own generation (he was 30 in 1918)--artists, architects, lawyers and doctors living in or around the rapidly expanding and prosperous provincial city of Utrecht.