637 utrecht sofas
Design Gerrit Thomas Rietveld,
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Rietveld, Dutch architect with a strong bent for experimentation, and one of the founders, with Mondrian, of the neo-plastic de stijl movement in 1917, designed the Utrecht model in 1935. This model was created for the Metz&co department store in Amsterdam, hence conceived for the mass market, and represents Rietveld’s decision to adopt a more “market oriented” approach to comfort and relaxation. An example of the breakdown of elements, emphasised by two types of visible stitching (saddle stitch or zig zag) in five different colours.
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Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, born in Utrecht on 24 June 1888, seems possessed of two personalities, each so distinct that one might take his work to be that of more than one artist. The first personality is that seen in the craftsman cabinet-maker working in a primordial idiom, re-inventing chairs and other furniture as if no one had ever built them before him and following a structural code all of his own; the second is that of the architect working with elegant formulas, determined to drive home the rationalist and neoplastic message in the context of European architecture. The two activities alternate, overlap, and fuse in a perfect osmosis unfolding then into a logical sequence. In 1918 Rietveld joined the “De Stijl” movement which had sprung up around the review of that name founded the year before by Theo van Doesburg. The group assimilated and translated into ideology certain laws on the dynamic breakdown of compositions (carrying them to an extreme) that had already been expressed in painting by the cubists: the “De Stijl” artists also carefully studied the architectonic lesson taught by the great Frank Lloyd Wright, whose influence was widely felt in Europe at that time.
Collaborating first with Robert van’t Hoff and Vilmos Huszar, then with Theo van Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren, Rietveld soon became one of the most distinguished interpreters of the neoplastic message.
The Cassina company was created by the brothers Cesare and Umberto Cassina in 1927 in Meda, Brianza, (Northern Italy). In 1964, the Cassina Masters Collection was born, with the acquisition of product rights of Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand. Today, Cassina is the exclusive worldwide licensee of the Le Corbusier designs. The "Cassina I Maestri" collection was widened in 1968 with the acquisition of reproduction rights to some of the Bauhaus objects, and in 1971, the designs of Gerrit Rietveld, Frank Lloyd Wright, and of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in 1972. The collection continued still, with the re-issue in 1983 of furniture by Erik Gunner Asplund, rights to reproduce furniture by Frank Lloyd Wright, including the Barrel chair, and, finally, in 2004, furniture by Charlotte Perriand.
