A Study on the Characteristics of Gerrit Rietveld's Furniture Design

Gerrit Rietveld 가구디자인의 조형특성연구

Gerrit Rietveld who is Dutch architect and furniture designer had explored the plastic abstractness based on the universality of De Stijl principle. He had tried to expand the boundary of furniture design bound to traditional form and decorative aesthetics. Beginning of 20th century, he opened the new aesthetic realm of pure and abstract value for furniture design for the first time. Through this research, the results can be summarized as follows. The characteristics of his deign are abstractness, spatial consideration and tectonic construction. The abstractness is attained by simplifying constructional material into geometrical forms such as straight line, rectangle and square. And he adopted unconventional way of construction in order to increase this abstractness. The space included in his furniture can be expressed in the new technology of joint, the visual transparency using linear material, and the destruction of corners. All these aspects harmoniously helped the feeling of architectural space of flow. Through the exposed frame of furniture, Rietveld emphasized on the tectonic construction by methodological treatment such as piling-up or overlapping material. The characteristics of Gerrit Rietveld's design are abstract, spatial and tectonic. These aesthetical tendencies could be understood as a junction between De Stijl's principles and modern architecture's spatial preferences-flow and extension of space-.