Red/Blue Chair (Rood Blauwe Stoel)

The Red/Blue Chair is perhaps the most influential and recognizable furniture design of the twentieth century because it redefined traditional notions of form and space within the confines of a practical household object. This design blurred the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture. By reducing form to a series of planes and boundaries delineating space but not containing it, Rietveld erased the isolation of the object in space and gave movement to static form. His use of primary colors negated the natural form of the material and objectified the whole. This concept is often referred to as neoplasticism and was the major tenet of the De Stijl movement in Holland in the early twentieth century.