Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was born in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1888. After working in his father's joinery business, he apprenticed at a jewellery studio. In 1911 he started his own cabinet-making firm, which he maintained for eight years. In this same period, he studied architecture.
Version of the Red/Blue chair, which was first published in De Stijl magazine and was included in an exhibition held at the Weimar Bauhaus in the same year 1917. Two years after having established himself as an independent architect in Utrecht, Rietveld started collaborating from 1921 with Mrs Truus Schröder-Schräder, for whom he designed the Schröder house (1924--1925). He kept a studio at the house until 1932 and resided there from 1958. Their joint architectural projects included a terrace of houses in Erasmuslaan (1934) and the Vreeburg Cinema, Utrecht (1936). He also collaborated with fellow De Stijl designer, Vilmos Huszár on a design for the Juryfreie Kunstschau Berlin of 1923. Rietveld's work was exhibited alongside other De Stijl designs in 1923 at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie l'Effort Moderne in Paris. In 1928, Rietveld became a member of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM), and from around this period his work became more international in outlook and he undertook numerous architectural projects both in the Netherlands and abroad.
From around 1944, he also taught at a number of universities and designed the Netherlands pavilion for the 1954 Venice Biennale. It was Rietveld's furniture, however, rather than his architecture that was of greatest influence. The geometric formal vocabulary of his Red/Blue chair, for instance, inspired Marcel Breuer's seminal tubular metal furniture designed at the Bauhaus in the late 1920s, which in turn briefly influenced Rietveld's choice of materials, as demonstrated by his Beugelstoel (1927). His Zig-Zag chair (1932--1934) and Crate chair (1934) reveal his return to elemental constructions in wood and can be seen as a response to the economic slump of the 1930s. During the 1940s and 1950s, Rietveld's work achieved much international recognition, and in 1958 he designed a fully upholstered armchair for the UNESCO building in Paris. Rietveld was one of the most innovative furniture and interior designers of the 20th century and was a key pioneer of the Modern Movement.
"The fact that I am constantly concerned with this extraordinary idea of the awakening of consciousness, may account for my work to be inevitably oriented towards spatial problems. Scaling of undefined space to human proportions may be achieved by a line drawn on a road, a floor, a wall, a covering surface, a combination of vertical and horizontal planes, curved or flat, transparent or massive. It is never a partitioning or closing off, but always a defining element of what is here and there, above and below, between and around."
Gerrit Rietveld, about defining space.
"Since I am a fervent believer in prefabrication, I am always looking for suitable units of measure which might be universally adopted. Aside from practical considerations, in each specific project I search for the most practicable scale, largest possible basic unit of measure that clearly brings out the proportions of the building. Like a film, our eye is able to see thousands of details at once, but at the same time, it is limited to the extent that it can only take in and appreciate five elements at a glance.
Series usually become units again. Generally, objects or buildings containing only a few main elements, represent the most flawless units. Adequate handling of measures in a building, although this may not show anymore afterwards, achieves a crystal clearness that may well be termed one of the secrets of good architecture."
Gerrit Rietveld, about prefabrication and unit of measure.
In 1963 he was elected an honorary member of the Bond van Nederlandse Architecten and in 1964 he received an honorary degree from the Technische Hochschule in Delft.
Rietveld died in Utrecht in 1964.
