Furniture - Master Details

Author: Luo DAKun / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: Rietveld sought to embody the principles of De Stijl in three-dimensional forms. He felt it necessary to deconstruct furniture into only its basic forms and then re-conceptualize each component as if the furniture had never been manufactured before, especially chairs, which were given various external symbolic meanings throughout the 20th century, demanding new conceptualization. A chair must have a seat, a backrest, and some support components. The Red and Blue Chair is extremely simple, with two flat rectangular panels placed at an angle to each other to form a backrest and seat suitable for sitting; the support frame is composed of scattered square or rectangular pieces, each at a right angle and joined together with screws rather than dovetail joints. There is no decoration; the chair's original components are made of natural beech wood. In the Schr?der House, he painted the backrest red, the seat blue, and the frame black, with all right angles highlighted in a striking yellow. It is placed on a black floor, leaning against a black wall, with the vivid backrest and seat appearing to soar in the air! Although this chair is simple to make, quite affordable, and comfortable, it was too simple for traditional furniture makers who took pride in their skilled craftsmanship, even somewhat rigid. However, for this self-taught genius, the "Red and Blue Chair" was just the beginning of his rich and varied career in furniture design. Like several other classic masters, Rietveld was always concerned with the integration of design and industrial production, as well as the application of new materials suited to modern society. It is generally believed that Marcel Breuer of the Bauhaus was a designer who used bent steel tubes for furniture, but in fact, Rietveld began using this vibrant new material almost at the same time, or even earlier than Breuer, as seen in the dining chairs for the Schr?der House. In fact, there was a lot of communication between the two at the time, with clear mutual influence, though Breuer's "Wassily Chair" was more elegant and more radical in design. In the following years, Rietveld used bent steel tubes and the then-trendy bent plywood to create a series of bold and innovative furniture designs. In 1927, his first steel tube furniture was put into production by the Amsterdam company Mets