Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 5 – Chas by Garry Knox Bennett
In an interview with Stefano Catalani(SC) Garry (GBK) explains:
SC: Chas Rietveld #5 is one of my favorite pieces. There is such an integration and compatibility. The quintessential elements of Mackintosh design are so well integrated with the Zig-Zag Chair . The two designs come together in the simplest way, almost obvious!
GKB: Yeah, that is pretty clever, isn’t it? The white bar goes all the way to the base, and that makes a real strong chair. You could sit a 500-lb. guy in that chair.
SC: You gave a technical and psychological solution to the only concern one has when one sits in the original Zig-Zag Chair —
GKB: Oh, of course, that it’s going to hold.
SC: What do you think of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s designs for furniture?
GKB: Another architect making furniture for Christ’s sake. It’s elegant, beautiful stuff, and is probably uncomfortable as hell. You know, there isn’t an architect in the world who can make chairs. They don’t understand chairs. You know? I haven’t seen an architect chair yet that’s worth a shit…well other than Le Corbusier and Charles Eames…
SC: And yet you had already paid homage to Mackintosh in the past.
GKB: Yeah. The Mackintosh Bench .
SC: It’s interesting, the first thing one would look for when looking at the bench would be any obvious reference to the austere elements of Mackintosh design: the high back, the grid, or the semicircular forms–
GKB: The colors! Mackintosh loved mauve. The bench had mauve. And mauve is the color I painted inside the square holes of the white bar on the back of Chas Rietveld .