Tag: Gerrit Thomas Rietveld

Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 3 – Duncan by Garry Knox Bennett

Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 3 - Duncan by Garry Knox Bennett
Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 3 – Duncan by Garry Knox Bennett

In an interview with Stefano Catalani (SC) Garry (GBK) explains:

SC: After the Shaker-inspired Old Ladderback and New Ladderback, you made the Duncan Rietveld, which is inspired by Duncan Phyfe [Ed. A famous American furniture designer. Note to self: find out if he is related to the famous Fife yacht designers].

GKB: And that’s an easy shape to do. There’s no carving in it, you know. I tried to find somebody who could carve me the back splat, the cherubs. I wanted something really gaudy. I found one guy who would do it, but then he asked, ” What are you going to do with it?” I explained to him and he didn’t want his work messed with. So, I could do it, if I could learn how to sharpen a chisel.

SC: You say that very often.

GKB: Yeah, I know, but they’re hard to sharpen. Some people can sharpen them real quick. Wendell Castle can sharpen a chisel in about five minutes. I could carve something, but it would take forever , and the whole idea here as in most of my work, is not to lavish a lot of time on this stuff. We’re just talking ideas here.

Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 2 – New Ladder Back by Garry Knox Bennett

Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 2 - New Ladder Back by Garry Knox Bennett

Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 2 – New Ladder Back by Garry Knox Bennett

Garry:

In an interview with Stefano Catalani (SC) Garry (GBK) explains:

SC: Did you build all the Zigzag chairs? Or are some of them Garry Knox Bennett’s “readymades”?

GKB: I think any original Rietveld chair would be a pretty expensive proposition. I don’t even know anybody who’s manufacturing them. But it’s a very easy chair to construct. It’s unbelievably simple.

SC: A lot of dovetail joints…

GKB: Yeah, but I modified it. I think in most cases, my engineering is better… I mean, they put dovetails in that real hard angle; I don’t even know who could make that dovetail. But they did, and they support it with gussets. I never saw a real Rietveld, but in all the pictures I saw, they had nuts and bolts in them, or they had these gussets stuck in them or battens. Instead of dovetails I used a spline joint: I set up a jig for the table saw, and sawed through the wood. I think there’s anywhere from twelve to maybe fifteen splines across. Then I milled down a piece of wood that fits in that slot, glued it in there really good, then sanded it all down even.

SC: What kind of wood did you use for your Zigzag chairs?

GKB: Any wood that was available. The wood wasn’t important.

SC: Rietveld’s Zig-Zag chair design is a stark and minimal assertion of function and form: four planes in space, four straight lines in profile. Did you fall in love with its lines?

GKB: It’s such a simple form that it allows itself a lot of manipulation. It’s an easy form to build off visually and physically: color, or what you can stick on it, like the wings or the ladder, or the Mackintosh high back. If you want, make it into an armchair!

SC: The first two Zigzag chairs you made are Old Ladderback and New Ladderback —

GKB: Right, the Shaker Ladderback.

SC: You started off with the classic Shaker craftsman style, one of the earliest and most popular American designs —

GKB: I just didn’t want to make a Rietveld chair. I was going to do something with it.

And everything just happened from that.

Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 1 – Old Ladder Back by Garry Knox Bennett

Rietveld Zig Zag Variation 1 - Old Ladder Back by Garry Knox BennettRietveld Zig Zag Variation 1 – Old Ladder Back by Garry Knox Bennett

I found Garry Knox Bennett‘s Gallery of Chairs. He likes to create series of chairs. Gerrit Rietveld has inspired Garry to a series of Zig Zag variations. I really like all of them. Rather than creating one very lengthy post, I’ll feature each variation separately. I do apologize for mixing up the sequence…because the original sequence is not entirely clear from GKB’s site:-)

In an interview by Stefano Catalani (SC) Garry (GKB) explains the inspiration the Zig Zag has given him:

SC: You started with the Zigzag chairs. You made sixteen chairs drawing inspiration from the design of Gerrit Rietveld’s 1934 Zig-Zag Chair . It’s a quite spartan chair in its original concept. What captured your interest about this model?

GKB: I’ve always looked at that chair as kind of a joke. I thought, “What a dumb chair this is!” And when I made the first, the ladder-back chair, which started out as kind of tongue-in-cheek, I sat in it, and it was a surprisingly comfortable little chair! I mean it works really well. You can get your feet behind it, when you tuck your feet under yourself; there’s no stretcher that gets in the way. It’s a good height: 18 inches, pretty standard. And it’s got some spring to it; it’s got a little limber to it. So then I have to admit, I actually fell in love with the model. From then on, I was fairly serious. Obviously I’m using puns in a lot of the titles, or a lot of visuals, but I got pretty serious about it.

After all various Dutch museums have declared 2010 to be the Rietveld Year and they will have several Rietveld designs on display. In addition, if Gerrit Rietveld would have been alive now and would have lived in the US, he might as well be known as Garry Reitveld, because Garry’s webmaster consequntly mis spelled Rietveld’s name:-)

Secretly I do hope one of the Dutch museums sees fit to get this Zig Zag collection on display for the Rietveld year.

Rietveld – Baas – Gehry – Che Eyzenbach Connections?


In surfing the internet for material for Chair Blog it helps me that I have a very associative mind. I was Googling pictures for “Burnt Rietveld”, because I noticed that I had no photos yet from Maarten Baas’s (in my view in)famous burned chair series which Maarten produced or maybe even created (I would avoid the term designed in this case) long before I started to blog here about chairs.

Nowadays I see several young designers piggy back on an illustrious predecessor’s name and produce a hack or an interpretation to create fame for themselves. I would say piggy back fame or media hype. I know I am a bit traditional in this sense and not so out of the box thinking as the honorable teachers of especially the Dutch Design Academy in Eindhoven tend to teach their students. On the other hand I do admit that it works. When I think burnt chair I immediately associate it with Maarten Baas. In that sense the piggy backing helps, because he dared to burn famous chairs.

Then I found the above photo of a Gerrit Rietveld‘s burnt Zig Zag Chair (another example here) by Maarten Baas at the Flickr account of….Che Eyzenbach and guess what? Che is a 2009 alumni from the Eindhoven Design Academy and designs chairs himself. His graduation project is a set of 7 beautifully designed cardboard seating elements by the name of Flow.


I know, by introducing Che in this way to you, this humble amateur chair aficionado now makes connections between Che Eyzenbach and famous predecessors and might suggest he was piggy backing. He was not! Certainly not in his designs, even not on Frank Gehry‘s Nested Cardboard Chair nor his Easy Edges Chair nor his Contour Chair, because Flow is an entirely different concept…

I may even do him injustice, because if I look into his portfolio, I have a feeling we will see his star rise to maybe equal or higher levels….

Have a look for yourself at Che’s site and let me know your view in the comments.

Utrecht or Metz Chair by Gerrit Rietveld

Utrecht-Chair-by-Gerrit-Rietveld-02-P1050213

Utrecht-Chair-by-Gerrit-Rietveld-01-P1050198

And thanks to my visit to La Suite I now can share my own photos of a black leather with white stitches Utrecht or Metz Armchair by Dutch architect and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld with you. It is much smaller than I had imagined. I love it!