Throughout the 1920s Rietveld worked within the community of avant garde artists like El Lissitzky and Piet Mondrian. He continued to be stylistically inspired by the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright, but he began to move beyond traditional forms into an exploration of more abstract shapes. Metz & Co. of Amsterdam put out his 1927 molded plywood "Beugel Stool," designed for mass production, in 1930. In 1934 they released a knock down chair made out of raw packing crate wood and designed for assembly at home. These chairs, criticized for their unfinished aesthetic, grew out of Rietveld's observation that "a piece of furniture made of high-grade wood and manufactured completely according to traditional production methods is transported in a crate to avoid damage...no one has ever ascertained that such a chest embodies an improvised, highly purposeful method of carpentry...there must therefore at long last be someone who chooses the crate rather than the piece of furniture."
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- bill 12-14-2004 1:27 am