< nr. 9 >

Zigzagstoel

Year: 1932

To design a chair out of one piece was Rietveld’s aim when he made the Zigzag Chair. The chair had to take up as little space as possible in the living room.

It took some time before Rietveld had finished the definite design of the Zigzag Chair. At first, he tried to make a similar chair using several different constructions. He made a version with a steel frame and a seat of fibreglass. A few of these designs later came back in other pieces of furniture. For example, Rietveld created a child’s seat and a chair with armrests in which the same shape is represented. The famous version of the Zigzag Chair was made especially for the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht.

The Zigzag Chair is built up out of solid elm wood sheets, glued together. The backrest and the seat are connected to each other through the system of dovetailing. The base and the seat use mitre joints and are strengthened with bolts. The chair used to be produced in sets of twenty copies by Metz & Co. Nowadays, it is still being produced, by Cassina.

Alongside the Zigzag Chair, Rietveld designed a long wooden table. The table’s base frame consists of two U-shaped wooden supports. Rietveld also combined the Zigzag Chairs often with simple wooden tables in the style of his crate furniture.