POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

Armchair designed by Gerrit Rietveld

Object No. 2009/22/1

Today it is hard to imagine that the now-ubiquitous tubular-steel style of furniture was once at the fore-front of modern design. In the mid 1920s tubular steel furniture had developed from purely utilitarian use in hospitals and transport to the domestic environment. Consequently, original examples of pre-WWII modernist furniture are rare - especially with the original receipt as is the case with this example. This chair (beugelstoel or tube-framed chair) designed in 1927 by the Dutch architect and designer, Gerrit Rietveld is representative of the very earliest adoption of tubular steel, and unique in its early combination with wood not seen again until the furniture of Ray and Charles Eames after WWII. It follows directly on from the German tubular steel and fabric B3 (later Wassily) chair of Marcel Breuer (1925) and cantilevered chair of Mart Stam (1926). However, the proportions and form are distinctly Rietveld, and a functionalist interpretation of his celebrated 'De Stijl' wooden chairs such as the Red Blue chair, and 1919 armchair. Later versions of both these chairs are in the Powerhouse Museum's collection (Powerhouse Museum object numbers 85/1835 and 85/116). In terms of their simple modernity, furniture incorporating tubular steel such as the beugelstoel echoed the philosophy of Walter Gropius (1883-1969), founder of the Bauhaus in Germany, when he stated that, 'metal furniture is to be nothing more than a necessary device for modern-day living' (Vitra 1994: 212). In 1927, the same year the beugelstoel was designed, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) proclaimed, 'A great epoch has begun. There exists a new spirit. There exists a mass of work conceived in this new spirit, it is to be met with particularly in industrial production . . .' Rietveld's beugelstoel fitted perfectly with the technological and aesthetic tenets of its time. The beugelstoel attained much international attention when it was exhibited at events such as the 1928 ASB (architecture, painting and sculpture) exhibition in Amsterdam. Of particular interest was Rietveld's experimentation with a one-piece (seen so commonly on furniture today) plywood seat and back as well as the use of metal tubing in a way that maximised the material's potential rather than mimicked older styles of furniture (as seen in the four legs of the original Breuer B3 for example). The beugelstoel has often been omitted from the mainstream and conveniently linear story of modern furniture development, and suffered in its comparison with the De Stijl innovations and its intellectual socio-political aspirations. This prejudice can be clearly seen in Daniele Baroni's choice of words for the chapter in her 1978 book on Rietveld titled, 'Contamination with Metal: The use of curved metal tubing in furniture'. However, in more recent times this attitude is changing (eg. Fiell and Fiell 2005: 136-137) and the chair had its original share of admirers at its time of production. Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999), Le Corbusier's collaborator was likely thinking about the beugelstoel when in 1929 she sanctioned the use of plywood as an ideal combination with metal, and Mart Stam, ordinarily a harsh critic (and designer of the first cantilever chair) praised the ingenuity of Rietveld's beugelstoel in his 1935 review of the exhibition 'The chair during the last 40 years' held that year at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (Voge 1993" 17-20). Recognition for the chair's attributes continued after the war. In the 1950s the armchair version of the beugelstoel was the acknowledged and direct inspiration for Verner Panton's 'Bachelor Chair' which was Panton's first of many commercial successes (Remmele 2000: 24). So, while Rietveld is most celebrated for his early iconic De Stijl pieces such as the Red Blue Chair, his later furniture such as the beugelsteol of this acquisition are only recently being better appreciated. As one of the main commentators on Rietveld, Peter Vöge notes, "Like his later architectural works, Rietveld's later furniture is often dismissed because it attempts to achieve the 'normative' rather then striving for constant innovation. Yet even 'normative' pieces such as the Beugelstoel, or some of the furniture designs of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, retain some residue of Rietveld's characteristic 'peculiarity'. His furniture never looks quite like 'normal' furniture. Even when designed for multiple production and produced in quantity, there always seems something of the 'aura' of the hand-made in these pieces" (1993: 21). Paul Donnelly, Curator Design, History and Society, December 2008. References Peter Vöge, 'The complete Rietveld furniture', 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1993 Danielle Baroni, 'Gerrit Thomas Rietveld furniture', Academy Editions, London, 1978 Marian Page, 'Furniture Designed by Architects', London, 1980 Le Corbusier, 'Towards a New Architecture', London 1927 Droste, M.; Ludewig, M., 'Marcel Breuer', Bauhaus Archiv / Taschen, Cologne, 1992 100 Masterpieces from the Vitra Design Museum Collection, Vitra, Weil am Rhine, 1994 'Dictionary of Design', Thames and Hudson, London, 1993 (2nd Edn 2004) Fiell, Charlotte. and Peter, 'Design of the 20th Century', Taschen, Cologne, 1999 Fiell, Charlotte. and Peter, '1000 Chairs', Taschen, Cologne, 2005 Remmele, Mathias and Von Vegesack, Alexander, 'Verner Panton: The collected works', Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhine, 2000