Gerrit Rietveld

Gerrit Rietveld (24 June 1888–25 June 1964) was a Dutch furniture designer and architect. One of the principal members of the Dutch artistic movement called De Stijl, Rietveld is famous for his Red and Blue Chair and for the Rietveld Schröder House, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Rietveld designed his famous Red and Blue Chair in 1917. In 1918, he started his own furniture factory, and changed the chair's colors after becoming influenced by the 'De Stijl' movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year in which he became an architect. He designed his first building, the Rietveld Schröder House, in 1924. He designed the "Zig-Zag" chair in 1934 and started the design of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was finished after his death. He built hundreds of homes, many of them in the city of Utrecht. I was carefully looking at the Red and Blue Chair design, beacues I was asked to make a model using the measurements of three people in my class I did few days ago. I devided it by 3 as I wanted to do it in a third size of an actual chair. I used pieces of cardboard boxes, a glue gun and acrylic paint to colour it according to the original chair. I took few photos while making my model to have the comparison between my and the original project, which then I stuck in my sketchbook. I quite enjoyed making this model chair, but it was a bit challenging.