Gerrit Rietveld Hanging Lamp⇒ Dutch designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld was a pioneer of modern design. The Gerrit Rietveld hanging lamp was one of his most important early works and reflects his progressive approach to architecture and furniture. Associated with the De Stijl movement, his designs made a huge impact in Holland and beyond, and still serve as an inspiration to the modern-day Dutch Design movement.
Rietveld Hanging Lamp
Even though not part of the mid-century modern period, the Dutch designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld was within the ones that most influenced the aesthetic of the postwar modernism, or mid-century modern- period.
The Gerrit Rietveld hanging lamp was made of four lighting tubes – manufactured by the Dutch company Philips – organized vertically and horizontally creating a three-dimensional hanging light sculpture.
A wooden block was attached at both sides of the four incandescent tubes that were suspended from sticks linked to a ceiling plate.
Aesthetic design by Gerrit Rietveld
Rietveld believed that the handcrafted furniture of the time was too heavy, too labor-intensive, and unnecessarily expensive. He was interested in how machines could produce furniture that was simpler in style and more accessible to a mass market.
The sculptural shape of this amazing lamp proves how Rietveld mastered the aesthetic values of the De Stijl movement to which he belonged. He could use the same spatial composition of elements for fittings, furniture, or architecture.
The lamp became immediately iconic and highly influential, it was probably not a coincidence that a very similar lamp was hanging in Walter Gropius office at the Bauhaus school in Dessau.
Today two original versions of this hanging lamp are at the Amsterdam Museum of Modern and Contemporary art -the Stedelijk- and at the Utrecht Central Museum.
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