Rietveld Year

Gerrit Thomas 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. By the time he opened his own furniture workshop in 1917, Rietveld had taught himself drawing, painting and model-making. Rietveld designed the "Zig-Zag" chair in 1934 and started the design of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was finished after his death. Rietveld had his first retrospective exhibition devoted to his architectural work at the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, in 1958. His work was neglected when rationalism came into vogue, but he later benefited from a revival of the style of the 1920s thirty years later.