Rietveld was born in Utrecht in 1888 as the son of a joiner. He left school at 11 to be apprenticed to his father and enrolled at night school before working as a draughtsman for C. J. Begeer, a jeweller in Utrecht, from 1906 to 1911. By the time he opened his own furniture workshop in 1917, Rietveld had taught himself drawing, painting and model-making. He afterwards set up in business as a cabinet-maker.

Rietveld designed his famous Red and Blue Chair in 1917. Hoping that much of his furniture would eventually be mass-produced rather than handcrafted, Rietveld aimed for simplicity in construction. In 1918, he started his own furniture factory, and changed the chair’s colors after becoming influenced by the ‘De Stijl’ movement, of which he became a member in 1919, the same year in which he became an architect. The contacts that he made at De Stijl gave him the opportunity to exhibit abroad as well. In 1923, Walter Gropius invited Rietveld to exhibit at the Bauhaus. He designed his first building, the Rietveld Schröder House, in 1924, in close collaboration with the owner Truus Schröder-Schräder. Built in Utrecht on the Prins Hendriklaan 50, the house has a conventional ground floor, but is radical on the top floor, lacking fixed walls but instead relying on sliding walls to create and change living spaces. The design seems like a three-dimensional realization of a Mondrianpainting. The house has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000.

Rietveld broke with ‘De Stijl’ in 1928 and became associated with a more functionalist style of architecture, known as either Nieuwe Zakelijkheid or Nieuwe Bouwen. The same year he joined the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. From the late 1920s he was concerned with social housing, inexpensive production methods, new materials, prefabrication and standardisation. In 1927 he was already experimenting with prefabricated concrete slabs, a very unusual material at that time. In the 1920s and 1930s, however, all his commissions came from private individuals, and it was not until the 1950s that he was able to put his progressive ideas about social housing into practice, in projects in Utrecht and Reeuwijk.

Rietveld designed the “Zig-Zag” chair in 1934 and started the design of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which was finished after his death.

In 1951 Rietveld designed a retrospective exhibition about De Stijl which was held in Amsterdam, Venice and New York. Interest in his work revived as a result. In subsequent years he was given many prestigious commissions, including the Dutch pavilion for the Venice Biennale (1953), the art academies in Amsterdam and Arnhem, and the press room for the UNESCO building in Paris. Designed for the display of small sculptures at the Third International Sculpture Exhibition in Arnhem’s Sonsbeek Park in 1955, Rietveld’s ‘Sonsbeek Pavilion’ was rebuilt with new materials at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 2010. In order to handle all these projects, in 1961 Rietveld set up a partnership with the architects Johan Van Dillen and J. Van Tricht built hundreds of homes, many of them in the city of Utrecht.

His work was neglected when rationalism came into vogue, but he later benefited from a revival of the style of the 1920s thirty years later.

First it was money folded into paper planes that were flown over the walls of dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s home. Now Chinese Internet users’ latest show of solidarity with Ai has taken the unlikeliest form of protest: mass nudity.

By Monday afternoon, seventy people had posted nude photos of themselves on a website called “Ai Wei Fans’ Nudity – Listen, Chinese Government: Nudity is not Pornography” – a rare form of protest in a country where public nudity is still taboo.

They uploaded the photos after Beijing police questioned Ai’s videographer on Thursday for allegedly spreading pornography online by taking nude photographs of Ai and four women.

Supporters of Ai, whose 81-day secret detention earlier this year sparked an international outcry, say that the questioning over the nude photographs is China’s latest effort to intimidate its most famous social critic.

The videographer, Zhao Zhao, said Beijing police interrogated him for about four hours on the motives behind the photographs.

“They said: ‘Don’t you know that the photos that you’ve taken are obscene photos?’” Zhao told Reuters by telephone. “I said: ‘I didn’t know that’ and said ‘how can they be considered obscene?’ They said they’ve characterized them as such.”

Ai paid a bond of 8.45 million yuan (S$1.73 million) last Tuesday, paving the way to file what he fears may be an ultimately futile appeal on a tax evasion charge that his supporters have said is a political vendetta. The money was raised from contributions from his supporters.

Wen Yunchao, who posted two nude photographs of himself on the website, said he believed the investigation against Ai’s assistant was the latest form of “persecution” against Ai.

“This is a matter that has made many people very indignant,” Hong Kong-based Wen said. “Because the interpretation of people’s naked bodies in itself is an individual freedom and a form of creative freedom. Also, we don’t see any pornographic elements in (Ai’s) photographs. So we are using this extreme method to express our protest.”

Many of the photos posted on the website were accompanied with politically tinged commentaries.

“Grandpa, is this pornography?” wrote a user, who was photographed bare-bottomed and writing on a wall with the words “’89 political turmoil,” referring to the June 4, 1989, armed crackdown in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

During Ai’s confinement, police had also questioned him about the nude photographs that were taken in August last year, Ai told Reuters.

Ai said the nude photographs had no deeper political meaning and were not meant to criticize the government, but he added that the government could perceive the photos as a “rebellious act.”

“We did it because it was a way to remove fear and the feeling of isolation,” Ai told Reuters. “Because fear and the feeling of isolation are defining characteristics in certain societies.

“Today, in reality, these (actions) are inappropriate for the time being. So when I see everyone like this, I feel young people still have some conscience.”

Ai Wei Fans’ Nudity —— Listen, Chinese Government： Nudity is not Pornography

http://awfannude.blogspot.com/

http://shanghaiist.com/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

Chinese Dissident Artist AI WEIWEI Never Sorry Webcinema DocDrama

In 1958 he designed one of the first chairs to be entirely fabricated from steel wire: the SM05. TheSM05′s classic design has been adapted to fit current sensibilities and has been brought back into production. Its wire design gives the SM05 a spatial effect and the cushion and the shape of the backrest ensure a comfortable sitting experience.