Gerrit Thomas Rietveld

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Publishers

Architecture

ISBN: 9789085069720
English edition
SUN architecture
Softcover, 160 pages
13,5 x 22 cm
illustrated
July 2010
€23,11 (excl. VAT)

Gerrit Thomas Rietveld

Life Thought Work

Bertus Mulder

This book is a biography on one of the most important Dutch architects, Gerrit Rietveld. It gives an insight to the life and work of Rietveld by one of his close collaborators, Bertus Mulder, who worked as an architect at Rietveld's studio.

At the end of the 1950s, the young architect Bertus Mulder came to work for Gerrit Rietveld. This working relationship, which lasted for a number of years, developed into a close relationship that allowed Mulder to get to know Rietveld and his immediate surroundings: his children, his Muse and beloved, Truus Schröder, and her children, Rietveld’s furniture maker, Van de Groenekan, and many others.

Later Bertus Mulder himself became a well-known architect and a leading expert in the field of restoring works of Gerrit Rietveld, among which is the famous Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht. During the restoration of the Rietveld Schröder House he had numerous, in-depth conversations with Mrs Schröder and conducted a research study of the vast collection of Rietveld’s writings she had collected.

As a result, no one could be more qualified to outline the interconnections of Rietveld’s life, thought and work than Bertus Mulder. Furthermore, this architect’s biography sheds an uncommonly clear light on the anthropological and philosophical backgrounds of the architectural body of work, which Rietveld called the ‘attitude to life’.