Only two identical copies of this design are known to exist. One of them was acquired by the Centraal Museum Utrecht in 2012. The other chair, now presented at TEFAF, is therefore the only example of this design that’s still available on the market.

In the early twentieth century, several designers sought to design furniture that could be machine-made by folding and bending a single sheet of material, to meet the growing demand for good, affordable furniture. Gerrit Rietveld was also fascinated by this phenomenon, and as early as 1927, he designed the so-called Birza Chair, a chair made from a sheet of fiberboard.

In world war II, Rietveld and his son Wim handcrafted a prototype of an armchair by folding a single sheet of material. Preserved drawings and sketches again mention fiberboard as the material to be used, but the chair was made from a sheet of aluminum. To reinforce the thin aluminum, Rietveld had a decorative pattern of holes pressed in, which gave the chair a futuristic machine look. Three more armchairs were handcrafted, based on the same design in the 1960s, bringing the total number of folded aluminum armchairs by Rietveld to four.

During a research in 2010, after the four aluminum armchairs by Rietveld, in commission of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the researchers came across two identical higher versions of the aluminum armchair. It was decided to expand the research and include these two previously unknown high model Aluminum Side/Table Chairs.

A spectacular discovery by the Rietveld specialized researchers, Rob Driessen and Jurjen Creman is a previously unpublished drawing Rietveld made on the back of an old envelope, addressed to him in the 1950s. The drawing shows a front- and sideview of the high model Aluminum Side/Table Chair, alongside with two drawings with dimensions and instructions for folding the chair from a single sheet of material. As in other drawings in which Rietveld sketched the design of the Aluminum Chair, “fiber” is again mentioned as the material to be used.

Researcher, Jurjen Creman, wrote in our catalogue, about the chair we show at TEFAF:

“The model of the aluminum chair shown here is a post-war production. It is a high model that Rietveld sketched on the back of an old envelope, which ironically bears the words “Do not fold.” A note specifies that the chair should be executed in fiberboard. In a drawing of a series of furniture intended to be made in rattan, the same chair is depicted in both a high and a low version. This aluminum chair and the archival materials demonstrate that, for Rietveld, different materials were suitable for the execution of his design. For the first model, he deliberately chose aluminum because he could work it relatively easily himself.”