#HTE

Rain’s Weekly Design Minutiae: How the Red & Blue Chair Seat/Back are Connected to the Frame

This is the second piece of furniture I ever built. It’s a duplicate of Gerrit Rietveld’s Red & Blue Chair, designed in 1919. I built mine in the early ‘90s, before the internet, and I found a book in the library that had a drawing very similar to the one below:

From that I broke out an architect’s scale and was able to reverse engineer the dimensions, then construct the chair. I was shocked at how comfortable it is, being made out of hard wood; the ergonomics are just perfect.

For the frame Rietveld used beech, which I couldn’t get my hands on, so I milled some Poplar down. For the seat and backrest I used the same material he had, plywood (½" in my case). I painted mine blue and purple because I thought it looked better.

When I was building it, one thing I couldn’t tell by looking at the diagram was how the seat and backrest were connected to the frame. I ended up drilling directly through them and into the crossmembers, then gluing in dowels. It was a real hack job; not only ugly, but they broke when a heavyset friend of mine sat in the chair and I had to reglue them.

I recently did some online searches to find out how they were originally joined, and could find nothing. In every photo I see, the seat/back joinery is obscured.

But the other day I passed the Cassina showroom in SoHo. They’ve licensed the chair and have one on the floor. I went inside and the staff ignored me while I got down on my hands and knees to peer under it and see how both were connected. I was dying to know what wondrous, magical joinery technique Rietveld had employed.

I was surprised to find it was nothing more than L-brackets, the kind you get for a few cents at your local hardware store, that were slightly bent to suit the angle. Here’s what I mean:

Anyways, I couldn’t find this information online, so now I’m posting it in the hopes that the next person who searches for it will find this. I cannot legally recommend that you knock the chair off, but if you want to build one for your own edification it’s fun and you will be surprised at how comfy the chair is to sit in, even for long stretches.

http://www.core77.com/posts/61763/Rains-Weekly-Design-Minutiae-How-the-Red-n-Blue-Chair-SeatBack-are-Connected-to-the-Frame