Designer and Client inBNI: I love you RietveldThursday 10 October

In Lex Reitsma’s documentary A piece of furniture to live in, owners of Rietveld homes share their experiences with the iconic designs. In her introduction, writer and historian Jessica van Geel highlights his most famous home: the Rietveld Schröder House. In fact, recent research shows that client and interior designer Truus Schröder created many more works together with her beloved Rietveld – designs that until now had only been attributed to Rietveld.

A Piece of Furniture to Live in

LEX REITSMA | THE NETHERLANDS 2024 | 52 MIN. | DUTCH | SUBTITLES: EN
Gerrit Rietveld, who began his career as a furniture maker, viewed his houses as pieces of furniture. The interior was just as important as the exterior. To mark the centenary of the Rietveld Schröder House, the first house added to the World Heritage List, director Lex Reitsma looks back at Rietveld’s houses. The central thread in the documentary is the audio recording in which Truus Schröder talks candidly about her many years of collaboration with Rietveld. Differences of opinion were common. For instance, Rietveld was convinced that a house should be demolished after fifty years, while Schröder ended up living in her home for sixty years. Featuring archival material and new interviews, A Piece of Furniture to Live In casts light on the thinking of a legendary Dutch designer.

One Beam, Shaped

WORLD PREMIERE | DAISY ZIYAN ZHANG | UNITED STATES 2024 | 3 MIN. | ENGLISH

The digitalization of manufacturing processes makes it possible to make beams that can support the internal distribution of forces down to the last gram. In the Shaped Beam Project by Doctor Paul Mayencourt and Professor Caitlin Mueller of the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a laminated timber beam is processed using digital techniques. Instead of a rectilinear profile, it is possible to create a sculptural beam in which the loads are directly translated into architecture.

About Jessica van Geel

Jessica van Geel is a historian and writer. For a long time she was a journalist at the renowned Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and she wrote, amongst others, for the progressive magazine Vrij Nederland. Van Geel is the author of ‘I love you, Rietveld’ (2018): the biography of Truus Schröder, co-designer and lover of architect Gerrit Rietveld. After her following literary non-fiction ‘Truus van Lier, the life of a resistance woman’, which was also critically acclaimed, she is currently conducting research with curator Natalie Dubois (Centraal Museum Utrecht) on “a visual biography” of the Rietveld Schröderhouse, designed by Irma Boom.