English: "Red and Blue Armchair" The compelling geometric paintings of Piet Mondrian and equally striking furniture of Gerrit Rietveld have become timeless -classics of 20th-century design. Rietveld’s buffet from 1919 shows these principles of construction, the prevailing relationship between line and plane, the qualities of lightness, and the use of the module in construction. Rietveld said, about defining space- "Scaling of undefined space to human proportions may be achieved by a line drawn on - a floor, a wall, - a combination of vertical and horizontal planes, curved or flat, transparent or massive. It is never a partitioning or closing off, but always a defining element of what is here and there, above and below, between and around." Rietveld buffet Originally a qualified cabinet-maker, and a fervent believer in prefabrication, he was a member of the group until 1930, by which time he was working as an independent architect. He aimed to design furniture for mass production that was cheap, that anyone could buy. From a social point of view he wanted to relieve the factory labourer from the boredom of hard and repetitive work, by means of machines. His chair, made in 1917 was revolutionary. Rietveld conceived this chair as separate constructions- the seat, the back, and the supporting frame. "The construction of the Red-Blue chair is based on a module of 10 cm which corresponds approximately to the thickness of three rails and this simple geometric construction is so clear that the chair can be made without using any kind of working drawings. The rails are doweled together and the seat and the back are fixed to the frame with screws. - The chair was specifically built to show that it is possible to create something beautiful, a spatial creation, with simple machine- processed parts. I cut a board of wood into planks and squares. I then sawed the middle part into two for the seat and the backrest, and I made the frame part out of the different lengths of plank. But as I was working on the chair, it never crossed my mind that one day it would become so significant that it would even influence architecture." Gerrit Rietveld chair Rietveld’s chair, an icon of modern design in its exploration of the nature of space, introduced the most radical change in the language of design for perhaps five hundred years. And its prototype originally had enclosed armrests. Originally stained a natural wood colour, Reitveld painted his chair around 1923, in primary colours of red, yellow and blue, in the mistaken belief that this triad of colours was the basis of colour vision; the three receptors in the eye, he believed, were sensitive to each of these colours. The painted chair now looked like a painting, a Mondrian painting in primary colours which became three dimensional. In 1920, he designed the interior of a doctor’s clinic, creating a light fitting that echoed the design principles of his furniture with its intersecting lines. Sculptural in its brevity, it consisted of several light bulbs suspended on their electrical wires that conveyed the effect of mathematical coordinates floating in space. An architectural commission in 1924, the Schroder House in Utrecht, was conceived in terms of straight lines and rectangular planes, materialized in the form of slabs, posts and beams. In it, Rietveld defined volume by planar, or flat elements which are linked like playing cards slotted at their intersections, but float, due to the separation of the planes. Moving walls made it possible to partition the upper living area into smaller rooms. The inside of the house had planes, painted primary colours that continued the floating effect evident in the exterior of the house, creating an environment that suggested openness, harmony and the elimination of closure. http-www.qdesign.co.nz-designhist_destijl.html