Rietveld at Utrecht’s Centraal Museum in 1958.
2018 Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York Pictoright/Amsterdam
In the early 1930s, Dutch department store Metz & Co. asked Gerrit Rietveld to do something unprecedented: design a chair for mass production.
The architect agreed, proposing a Z-shaped perch made from four slices of sturdy elm supported by dovetail joints and metal screws. It was no standard seat, but to everyone’s surprise the armless, legless, cantilevered form—a mere sliver in profile—was simultaneously comfortable and sturdy.
“It is not a chair but a designer’s joke,” Rietveld famously said of his Zig-Zag.
Creatives of all stripes were taken with its smart craftsmanship: Several decades later, artist Donald Judd placed five around a dining table at his New York place, 101 Spring Street, and two more at his Architecture Office in Marfa, Texas. In an arty advertising campaign, Karl Lagerfeld deemed it a favorite.