The Dutch architect Gerrit Rietveld is mostly known for his jaunty 1918 “Red Blue Chair,” a sculptural seat whose red-lacquered back and blue seat meet at right angles. It was an experiment to translate flat geometric grids into a three-dimensional, functional object.
“It was made famous almost immediately through photography,” says Barry Bergdoll, professor of modern architectural history at Columbia University. He is a curator of a riveting photography show, “Gerrit Rietveld: Wealth of Sobriety” at the Center for Architecture (through Sept. 2). “The chair announced the avant-garde abstract design principles of the de Stijl movement in the Netherlands in the 1920s,” Bergdoll said.
Few are aware that Rietveld (1888-1964) designed an estimated 100 houses between 1924 and 1964, 15 of which are documented in the show by its other curator, the Dutch architectural photographer Arjan Bronkhorst. He spent two years taking 400 photos of Rietveld residences for a book of the same title. All are in the Netherlands except for one that is in Ohio, and the great discovery of the show.
The installation mingles modest house exteriors (typically small, geometric, flat-roofed houses painted white with accents in primary colors) with intricate interiors.
“We took a somewhat radical approach,” Bergdoll explained. “The photos are not grouped according to the building they represent but are freely mixed up with one another, to show the richness of life out of a deliberate reduction of things, thus the title the “Wealth of Sobriety’.”
Some of his photographs of the interiors include portraits of the owners, many of them descendants of the families who commissioned the houses. They obviously appreciate Rietveld’s original schemes, because they have left them amazingly unchanged, especially the built-in elements, a testimony to Rietveld’s training as a master carpenter.
“I was looking for Rietveld interiors that were still authentic,” Bronkhorst said. “My focus was on design elements, patterns and colors. Rietveld was influenced by light and used color as a design element. Lines and planes dominate his designs. His cabinets look like 3-D Mondrians.”
Rietveld was a self-trained architect. He was born into a family of middle-class entrepreneurs. His father ran a furniture workshop in Utrecht that supplied well-to-do families. Rietveld left school at age 11 to join his father’s business, training as a carpenter and a contractor.
He was ambitious. At the age of 16 he began taking evening courses in technical drawing, and in 1917 he left to open his own workshop.
In 1919 he joined the de Stijl (Dutch for “The Style”) art movement founded in 1917 by the Dutch painters Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. It promoted pure abstraction through geometry (squares and rectangles, strict vertical and horizontal lines) and a primary color palette (red, yellow, blue).
The movement rejected symmetry in pursuit of a “universal harmony.” The goal was to remove the personality of the artist in favor of precise harmonies — and, like the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, to eliminate the distinction between high art, applied art and architecture.
It was also highly political.
“The majority of artists and architects associated with de Stijl were sympathetic to socialism, anarchism or communism,” the British art historian Paul Overy wrote in his 1991 book “De Stijl.” “The artists and architects were almost all deeply engaged with new and evolving ideas about the production and consumption of art and design and the relationship of those to modern society and social life.”
They had, he writes, “a utopian faith in the transforming qualities of mechanization and new technology.”
A de Stijl interior was meant to model a new way of living.
Rietveld’s interiors feature built-in bunk beds, desks, couches, cabinets and bookcases. Original furnishings include his inexpensive “Zig Zag” or “Crate” chairs and geometric, bare-bulb light fixtures. Dashes of color abound: Metal door surrounds are red. Cupboards are blue. Ironing boards are yellow.
The master’s characteristic signatures are also seen in the Rietveld house outside Oberlin, Ohio. It is a white four-bedroom split-level home, with a single floor in front and two floors in back on a steep slope overlooking the Vermilion River.
The owner was Charles Percy Parkhurst, an Oberlin College art history professor who had served with the Monuments Men in Europe in 1945 to retrieve art looted by the Nazis. Parkhurst was interested in modern architecture, and he met Rietveld in 1956 while studying under a Fulbright in Utrecht. He was introduced by his friend Theodore M. Brown, Rietveld’s American biographer (“The Work of G. Rietveld, Architect”).
Parkhurst commissioned a house from the architect for a large tract of woodland he owned outside Oberlin. Rietveld gave Parkhurst the blueprints to take back to Ohio, and Parkhurst built the house with family, friends and a good mason.
He made a lot of changes to the original plan to reduce the cost: He used wood window frames instead of steel. He gave the flat roof an incline to drain rainwater and snow. He substituted concrete for brick on the fireplace and installed a spiral staircase.
“Rietveld never saw the house,” Bronkhorst writes in his book. “He was refused entry to the United States in 1956 as an alleged communist sympathizer.”
Parkhurst and his first wife, Elizabeth Huntington Rusling, divorced; she got the house in 1962. In 1966, she sold it to Hugh Brown, an Oberlin College graduate who worked for General Motors. When the company transferred Brown to Detroit, he had difficulty selling the house, so General Motors bought the property. In 1976, the company sold the house and half the property to Warren Squire, a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory who raised three children there. His son, Jeffrey P. Squire, is the current owner, and he uses it as a weekend house.
“My dad felt he had to make a lot of changes to make the house livable,” Squire said. “The kitchen was tiny, so he combined three little rooms to make one big open kitchen. He thought the balcony on the second floor was too small, so he combined it with two bedrooms to make a master suite.”
Squire is proud of the house and said in an interview that he is constantly improving it, but he has no intention of restoring it to Rietveld’s original blueprints.
“The way it was built was impractical,” he said. “I have avoided trying to make it an official anything, because that would limit what I could do to it. This is my bachelor pad, for good or bad.” He figures Rietveld would be OK with that.
“Rietveld was championed early in the United States, notably by the curators of the Museum of Modern Art from the 1930s, and then through the passion that Donald Judd had for his furniture,” Bergdoll said. “But I never met an architect or architectural historian who knew that there was a house by Rietveld in the U.S. And what a surprise to discover that it is still there, intact if altered over the years.”
Gerrit Rietveld: Wealth of Sobriety
Through Sept. 2, AIA New York Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, 212-683-0023; info@ai.any.org.
