Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld (1888 to 1964) was a Dutch furniture designer and architect, born in Utrecht as the son of a joiner. He left school at eleven to apprentice with his father, later worked as a draughtsman for a jeweller, and opened his own furniture workshop in 1917, the year he designed the Red and Blue Chair, now an icon of modern furniture. Influenced by the De Stijl movement, he joined it in 1919 and became an architect that same year. In 1924 he built the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht in close collaboration with its owner Truus Schröder-Schräder; its sliding walls and open upper floor have made it a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000. He broke with De Stijl in 1928, turned to the functionalist architecture known as Nieuwe Zakelijkheid or Nieuwe Bouwen, joined the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne, and worked on social housing, prefabrication and new materials. He designed the Zig-Zag Chair in 1934 and began the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, completed after his death in Utrecht in 1964.