By Owen Flynn

 Gerrit Rietveld was a furniture designer and architect of some repute during the twentieth century  He is most famous for his Red and Blue chair and the Schroder house in Utrecht

 Born in utrecht in 1888  Age 12 apprenticed as a cabinet maker  From 1904 to 1908 studied the art of drawing and ornamentation  1917 Opened his own workshop

 Began making bespoke furniture for clients  Made for H.G.Shelling a dutch railway engineer

 In 1906 he attended a series of lectures by the architect P. J. C. Klaarhamer  Klaarhamer shared a workshop with Bart van der Leck  Bart van der Leck was one of the founding members of the “De Stijl” journal

 Avant Garde Idealists  De Stijl  Socialism

 Founded by Theo van Doesburg  Bart van der Leck  Piet Mondrian  J.J.P Oud  Vilmos Huszar

 Ultimate simplicity and abstraction, both in architecture and painting, by using only straight horizontal and vertical lines and rectangular forms. Furthermore, formal vocabulary is limited to the primary colours, red, blue and yellow, and the three primary values of black, white and grey. Work must avoid symmetry. Aesthetic balance is attained by opposition

 Around 1923/4 he was commissioned by Truss Schroder to build a house for her and her family. This is widely considered his finest work  It was after the Schroder house that he decided to become a full time architect. Although he did continue to design furniture for buildings for which he was commissioned

 Gerrit Rietvelds convictions that beautiful functional furniture should be made available to the masses were what inspired many of his designs  Not to enclose space....to leave the space uninterrupted

 His work takes symmetrical space and makes it asymmetrical, this gives the appearance of blurred space no matter which direction you look at it  His furniture was generally made form cheaper timber such as pine and plywood and finished with paint

 His work was the start of what is now modern cabinet making  He took modern techniques and ideas and applied them to the furniture he designed  The idea to mass produce cheap furniture was way ahead of Ingvar Feodor Kamprad

 His designs and influences can be seen everywhere, in modern architecture, furniture designers of the sixties and seventies and beyond