Gerrit Thomas Rietveld Furnitures

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld

Rietveld began his career in his father’s cabinet-making shop.
Eclectic spirit that he was, he opened his own workshop in 1911 and enrolled in evening architecture classes under Klaarhamer who had already had an opportunity to admire some furniture pieces that Rietveld had designed in 1908.
It was only several years later, in 1919 that Rietveld joined an association of intellectuals known as the De Stijl Group which, embracing the styles of the painter Piet Mondrian and the architect Theo van Doesburg, was committed to a philosophy of radical renewal that extended beyond design to literature and all art forms.
Starting from Cubism it went to a rigid geometric order. Rietveld built the Schroeder house in Utrecht according to De Stijl’s rules: the basic shape is the cube, the dominant material glass so that the interior and exterior spaces can merge with total continuity.
From that time on he designed the mass produced houses for the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
From there it was just a short step to the founding of the “International Congress of Modern Architecture”.
Rietveld’s success was consecrated by many architectural and town-planning commissions, a grand retrospective show dedicated to him by the city of Utrecht and an honorary degree from the Delft Polytechnic Institute.