Gerrit Rietveld and Gerard A. van de Groenekan, model of the Berlin chair, 1923; wood; 106 x 75 x 58 cm; collection Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Photograph: Ernst Moritz

Gerrit Rietveld, model of a handcart, 1925 (designed c. 1922–23); redwood, beech, oak, and plywood; 65 x 112 x 65 cm (without the drawbar); collection Centraal Museum, Utrecht, Netherlands.
Photograph: Ernst Moritz

Rietveld Schröder House, detail of the interior, Utrecht, Netherlands, 1924 (architect: Gerrit Rietveld).
Photograph: Kim Zwarts, courtesy Centraal Museum

rietveld's universe: rietveld, frank lloyd wright, le corbusier, theo van doesburg
Curators: rob dettingmeijer, marie-therese van thoor, and ida van zijl

Utrecht, Centraal Museum, 20 October 2010 – 13 February 2011
Rome, MAXXI, 14 April – 17 July 2011

PDF version

My first impression when visiting the exhibition ‘Rietveld’s Universe’ was a sense of disclosure. We all know about the importance and influence of Gerrit Rietveld’s work, but when attention moves away from him everything seems to slide into a dense but less defined horizon and what remains is the Schröder House and a few unforgettable pieces of furniture. The most immediate contribution of this exhibition is as a reminder of the breadth and depth of Rietveld’s legacy, made evident not only through a thorough display of his complete series of works but also through the focus on the wide range of small and large issues addressed by the Utrecht master. The construction of this new critical consciousness is also well supported by the choice of the continuous ‘face to face’ confrontation with Rietveld’s contemporaries, considered as the real key to his conceptual and formal universe. Furthermore, the curators, both in the show and in the catalogue, aimed to place Rietveld comfortably among the masters of Modernism, and to keep his profile as far removed as possible from being exclusively a representative of De Stijl, the best-known of Dutch Modernist artistic movements.

The show also conveys an overwhelming sense of duality and time displacement. Rietveld, or at least the concept guiding this exhibition, speaks to us about the roots of Modernism, and the way we look at it today. It is an unexpected sensation, just like working on a site or text that is both archaeological and contemporary at the same time and challenges both our knowledge and our creativity. Rietveld’s unspoken manifesto is clear in this sense: simplicity of components, process versus style, and assemblage versus composition ensure that the original components remain visible after the assemblage is performed.

So, what’s my reading of ‘Rietveld’s Universe’? Why should we consider this show and its curatorial approach relevant? Where, beyond the obvious historians’ hunger for continuously re-reading fundamental topics, is the ‘actuality’ of Rietveld’s oeuvre? I found several answers.
The first derives from a quote by Rietveld displayed at the exhibition: ‘My furniture tries not to interrupt the space.’ This quote contains the most inclusive legacy of this exhibition and the best possible answer to our ordinary quest about what ‘modern’ means for our everyday life. And it perfectly matches with Rietveld’s approach to architecture and design, an approach intended to be a non-separated and synchronic investigation of space, society, and technique.
The second has to do with history and historiography. My impression is that the twenty-first century is still waiting for a new approach and a new reading of the ‘epic’ of Modernism and of the work of its masters. Together with other books and curatorial projects now in preparation, ‘Rietveld’s Universe’ could be one of the first steps towards defining a new approach to the history of modern and contemporary architecture.

I’m impressed by how the show relates to the issues of contemporary architecture. The seeming indifference to our age of the materials and items in the exhibition is contradicted at the end of the visiting route by the presence of the artist’s fierce red and blue that acts as an abrupt break-in of the contemporary uncanny in the peaceful display of the show. This reminds me of the condition of architecture today, and how each new generation of designers reacts to the urge for renewal, as strong today as never before, by developing their own independent reading of history. It is the story of early Modernism, with Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe reading classicism. It happened in Italy in the Fifties, with Aldo Rossi and his classmates at the Milan Politecnical University (the so-called ‘giovani delle colonne’) dedicating issues of Casabella continuità to designers such as Adolf Loos and Hendrik Pieter Berlage. It happened again in New York in the late Sixties, when the Five tuned their reading of the modern tradition, to say nothing of Post-Modernism, or the liaisons dangereuses between de-constructivist architects and the early twentieth-century avant-garde, as evidenced by the exhibition Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley at the MoMA in 1988.

There is a real chance that ‘Rietveld’s Universe’ will offer to the young the possibility to start writing their own history and transferring it into the articulate landscape of political, artistic, ecological, and social issues that architects are facing today. Rietveld developed his own political approach to democratic design, moving discretely from the use of basic carpentry timber to the construction of furniture and the ambitious investigation of the problems of mass housing. I recall that in the exhibition Spazio, the opening show of the MAXXI museum in Rome (May 2010), many of the invited architects focused on issues Rietveld was used to address. A Scandinavian designer in particular, Sami Rintala (Rintala & Eggertson, Oslo), decided to answer the brief by building with his own hands a house in the MAXXI courtyard, basically using only those carpentry timber elements Rietveld was the first to apply in the design of furniture and buildings.

For the curators of ‘Rietveld’s Universe’ it was not an easy task to fit the strongly structured sequence in the traditional layout of rooms in Utrecht’s Centraal Museum. The device they chose, based on the double distinction of front–back and white–grey, proved successful in making the show readable to every type of audience. Since we learned, however, that the exhibition will travel to other places (I can personally vouch for MAXXI), it will be interesting to see the Rietveld narrative displayed in different spaces, possibly attracting new readings and provoking discussion about its relation to contemporary space and time.

Pippo Ciorra
Ascoli Piceno Faculty of Architecture
University of Camerino

Publication related to the exhibition:
Rob Dettingmeijer, Marie-Thérèse van Thoor, and Ida van Zijl, editors, Rietveld’s Universe, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, colour and b/w/ ill., € 47.50, ISBN 978-90-5662-746-1