The Tube-Framed Chair from 1927, also known as Beugelstoel, was Gerrit T. Rietveld’s first design to use bent tubular metal. Its tubular steel supports describe a continuous line. This was one of the aesthetic possibilities offered by tubular metal, which designers saw as a challenge. Rietvelds design, however, is more intriguing than most tube-framed furniture. The structure of two supports connected by a single sheet of bent plywood – conceived five years before Alvar Aalto caused a furore with his Paimio Chair – was revolutionary.
A prototype of the Tube-Framed Chair was first presented in the exhibition Architectuur, Schilderkunst en Beeldhouwkunst at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in February 1928. Six months later Adolf G. Schneck included models with and without armrests in the exhibition Der Stuhl in Stuttgart, Germany. When the same exhibition was shown in Frankfurt am Main in 1929, another version of the Tube-Framed Chair with a low seat was presented. Thus Alvar Aalto would certainly have been aware of Rietveld’s chair.
In 1931, Rietveld presented the Tube-Framed Chair in his model home at Erasmuslaan in Utrecht alongside other examples of his tubular steel furniture produced by Metz & Co., a department store inspired by Liberty & Co in London. Despite this promising start, Rietveld’s Tube-Framed Chair remained relatively unknown, and the design’s significance for the development of twentieth-century furniture was scarcely acknowledged until recently.
Text: Ida van Zijl
