sundance

Gerrit Rietveld, the lost designer

There are many names associated with the early 20th-century boom in design. Rockstars like Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright immediately come to mind, but for every major player you can bet there are dozens of equally talented designers, artists and architects whose names don’t flow as quickly from our 21st-century tongues. One of those whose legacy remains known amongst industry professionals only is Gerrit Rietveld, but they’re trying to fix that.

Famous for two major designs, his “Red-blue armchair” (1918) and the Schröder House (1924), Rietveld’s other work, his furniture and over 100 homes, has mostly been forgotten (scroll down for pics). That’s why the city of Utrecht, Rietveld’s hometown and the location of the majority of his architecture, declared 2010 “Rietveld Year,” which included, among other things, the exhibition “Rietveld’s Universe” at Utrecht’s Centraal Museum. To show Rietveld’s prominence amongst the designers of his day, his work is displayed alongside those rockstars Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as Piet Mondrian, an obvious and major influence.

Still, it’s hard to get past the show-stopping effect of the armchair and the Schröder House, even when you consider his vast body of work. After all, it was his ingenious use of space in the interior of the house that earned him the tagline “the wise old man of Dutch design.” The main rooms were separated with moveable, sliding walls that can be closed for privacy or opened to create a large communal space for the homeowner’s children to play in. Plus, with it’s yellow, blue and red exterior accents it kind of stand out on the block.