rietveld's berlin chair (and a bench!)

 

Another classic from Rietveld's oeuvre is the Berlin Chair, first conceived and built in 1923 for the "Juryfreie Kunstschau" (jury-free art show) in (you guessed it...): Berlin!  The chair is a de Stijl masterpiece. I sat in a knock-off of one in Marfa, and it is more comfortable than it looks (but you would not want to spend a football game in it). 

The two sets of plans below are from my How-to-Build-Reitveld-Furniture books.

An emerging theme with this Rietveld furniture is that much of it was reintroduced later, when the design world caught up (and history put his designs into context). His 1960 version of the chair put an angle in the arm rest in an almost quaint nod to comfort. I prefer that version I reckon.

The second design book I bought unexpectedly included a design for a bench I had never seen before. The book doesn't have a date, but says it was designed and built for the Fraenkel (Frenkel?) Family and that he designed a similar bench for the Rietveld-Schröder House. 

A couple of web pages (with no supporting documention) tag the bench with 1930. The similar piece in the Rietveld-Schröder House is probably the piece here with the cushion on it:

Donald Judd (1928-1994), the American minimalist sculptor, has a similar piece:

So here's Rietveld's design according to the books I have:

This flickr site (where the previous two photos of this bench came from) has some details of the construction:

 

 

 

A weird thing about this design is that it seems to have been created for little people (or kids). The height at the seat is a mere 29.3 centimeters: about 11.5 inches. That is not old, fat dude friendly. I think the whole kit and kaboodle needs to be scaled up to a 40 centimeter bench height (which allows for a cushion). So to build this, everything should be multiplied by 1.365.

For our space, we need the mirror image. in other words:

The photos above have a different height for the long backing piece that extends above the seat. It's actually better visually (by my eye) at that shorter height. It could be that Rietveld improved the design when he reintroduced it later or that the plans in the book ain't quite right. I've not been able to find photos of the original piece, and the definitive book on his furniture runs $250.