Red-Blue Chair

The Red-Blue Chair, designed by the Dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964) in 1918-23, is perhaps one of Rietveld’s most iconic pieces of furniture. The chair can be seen as a reflection of some of the ideas that defined the De Stijl movement, of which Rietveld was one of the leading exponents.

The chair is constructed of four rectangular panels and thirteen beechwood slats. The connection of the parts, an overlapping joint of three batons, created the distinctive ‘Rietveld joint’, also called the Cartesian node. [1] This was a prominent feature in the Red- Blue Chair which recalls the fundamental ideas of De Stijl that aimed for ultimate simplicity and abstraction by accentuating the individual elements that was part of and created the whole. [2] De Stijl had a belief in a balance between the universal and collective and the specific and individual, as it was stated in the third point of their Manifesto from 1918: “The new art has brought forward what the new consciousness of time contains: a balance between the universal and the individual.” [3]

The Red-Blue Chair resembles a traditional chair that has been stripped down to its basic structural skeleton, a ‘deconstruction’ into individual elements from which the chair was made. Through this, Rietveld could manipulate rectilinear volumes and create interaction between vertical and horizontal planes in the same way as he did in his architecture. The exposition of elements also accentuates the process of construction, which creates a furniture based on industrialized production methods and standardized components. Rietveld’s furniture was closely concerned with the idea of evolving new types for new methods of production. [4] Although there could be differences in dimensions and finishes, the rationalization and standardization of the chair made it suitable for batch or quantity production. De Stijl had a “a utopian faith in the transforming qualities of mechanization and new technology” [5]

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