is overrun by a group of schoolchildren, who unwittingly treat the stools like so
much playground equipment. Although based on a commission for a local geriatric
home, Military is clearly suited for all ages. The ensemble provides a window into
Rietveld’s prescience about furniture’s role in contemporary life.
Seijler, a towering teddy bear of a man, finally arrives. But the café transforms
from appetizer to tease: museum curator and Rietveld expert Ida van Zijl, who
co-authored the massive 1992 reference Gerrit Rietveld: The Complete Works, hasn’t
come to work that day. The hangar-like warehouse containing the treasure trove of
untrumpeted Rietveld designs — off limits. What about the museum’s display collec-
tion? The exhibition is traveling.
So Seijler clears out some free space in his portable office of a Volvo and we
shuttle to the east side of Utrecht to visit the landmark Rietveld Schröder House of
1923. The house is more than a Rietveld object writ large. The flexible interior, in
which just about every wall is moveable, lends meaning to the dynamic exterior, as
well as to the furniture designed around the same time: the mind can animate these
surfaces, transpose them or make them fly away.
Indeed, if it were possible to foment revolution in just seven rails, six posts, two struts,
two boards and a series of dowel pins and nails, then Rietveld’s Red and Blue chair did just
that. The chair, which was, in fact, produced in a variety of color schemes, encapsulated
Collection “Cassina I Maestri.” Photo Mario Carrieri.
both the functionalist teachings that inaugurated the Bauhaus the following year and the
stripped-down, geometry-as-ornamentation approach of the Czech Cubists. As conceptu-
ally seductive as it was stylish, the chair propelled its maker into the De Stijl community —
and perhaps even helped crystallize the nascent movement, whose members published
it in their eponymous magazine almost immediately. But the chair’s influence eventually
reached well beyond De Stijl, to become an icon of the larger modern movement.
Surely, Red and Blue is the embodiment of simplicity. This composition of easily
sourced and manufactured parts dissects furniture anatomy; it is an abstraction of a
chair that diminishes the boundaries between interior and exterior. But what makes
the design truly epiphanic is the way its rails and posts fly out beyond one another
into space, a trope that is echoed in the intersection of the back and the seat. These
dynamic corners suggest that all objects are but series of potential lines and planes,
figments of the imagination — a commentary on the European psyche between the
wars, perhaps, or the fragility of the modern condition. More practically speaking, Red
and Blue’s appearance of tenuousness makes for an active relationship between the
sitter and the seat, encouraging him to consider the chair’s sturdiness, test its comfort,
ponder its cultural origins and reassess all other chairs he has tried before.
tesy Rietveld by Rietveld.
“Red and Blue was the start of his new way of thinking about chairs,” Seijler says, a
Cour
reconsideration of the very nature of furniture that extended to his designs for the Zig-
Zag (1934) and Utrecht chairs and the Divan side table (1922–23), now better known
as Schroeder 1. The cantilevered wooden Zig-Zag, a feat of engineering, is a wink
toward the tubular-steel production that had come into vogue, while Utrecht proves
that Rietveld’s vision was not limited to hard surfaces, but could be rendered in cush-
iony planes. The asymmetrical, differently colored pieces of Schroeder 1, meanwhile,
celebrate the independence of the componentry as well as the sum of the parts.
The Italian furniture company Cassina has held the exclusive rights to produce
these furniture designs since 1971. At the time of the contract negotiations, Seijler
Top A 1923 creation is the stained and lacquered wood Divan table, now produced
by Cassina and known as the Schroeder 1.
Center A jeweler in the Hague commissioned Rietveld to create a mirror-image pair
of Steltman chairs for his shop in 1963, as part of a renovation that the designer
oversaw. Rietveld filled only a few additional Steltman orders before his death the
following year. Originally upholstered in white leather, today Rietveld by Rietveld
produces the chair without cladding to reveal the oak frame, in natural, white, and
black colorways.
Bottom Rietveld produced the black-and-white Berlin chair in his workshop when it was
introduced in 1923. It was designed for the De Stijl room that he and Vilmos Huszar created
tesy Rietveld by Rietveld.
at an exhibition in Berlin and was part of Rietveld by Rietveld’s launch collection. Cour
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