In honour of Tom Boekema, who inspired me to work until 3am at several nights for this school project.
Thanks for all of your beautiful lessons, stories and conversations.
You were a wonderful man.
Gerrit Rietveld is a very important influence for a lot of architects, furniture designers and even other sorts of designers. Most people think he was far ahead of his time in terms of his designs. What fascinates me most about him is his spatial awareness.
Most of his furniture is based around a few concepts. One of them is the spatial feeling. The Lattenleunstoel (Red Blue chair) and the Zigzagstoel are great examples of this. The other concept is to make a chair out of one panel. This concept applies to the Zigzagstoel as well, but also to other chairs like the Kratstoel and the Aluminiumstoel, which is a concept that has never been produced. He also tried to make this chair more spacious by adding holes in the material.
Since I got interested in Rietveld's spatial awareness, I wanted to make a chair that would feel very spacious and modern, but make it with traditional techniques to give an interesting contrast, but also to put my own stamp on it. Since Rietvelds furniture was often made out of a single panel, I made this entire chair as minimalistic as possible. I only used one wooden beam, one saw and one chisel.
Some of the wood joints are quite unusual and the joint in the backrest in the second picture might even look impossible at first. However, if you look close enough you can probably figure everything out. Some other joints might not look complicated at first sight but are technically pretty hard to make. This corresponds well with what I often like to do as a designer; make a product look simple, but make it in the most beautiful way possible. Also as a design element, I made the line of the armrest run through to the backrest. This way it looks like half of the backrest is folded open to create both an armrest and a backrest instead of how a normal chair would look like.
So after Gerrit Rietveld's Lattenstoel and Kratstoel, I made my own Balkenstoel. This model is available on request and can be made in different types of wood in several finishes.
You can take a look at the process on my instagram as a highlight.
