ORIGINAL DESIGNER: Gerrit Rietveld NEW DESIGNER: Elm

As part of our third year interior environmental design course we have been in the workshop reproducing our own version of Gerrit Rietvelds's Zig Zag chair.

For this project I have been working with 2 other girls, one of which is a Dutch exchange student who studies interior and furniture design in Mechelen, Belgium.  The first letter of each of our names, Esther Lynsey and Mandy formed the group name 'Elm' -appropriate for a wood based project eh?

Gerrit Rietveld was a Dutch architect and a furniture designer.  He designed the ''Zig-Zag'' chair in 1934 using only 4 elements joined with a system of dovetailing.  The chair's visual simplicity was created using a relatively complex construction.

The design is said to be an expression of the 'De Stijl' movement and is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.  The chair is made of natural cherry and can serve as either a chair or a side table.

Over the past 4 weeks we have spent our Friday after noons creating our own version of the chair.  We have found the process rather mind boggling -especially when calculating the angle each piece of wood needed to be 'planed' at.

The processes that we have tackled are as follows:

-concise measuring

-using the bandsaw

-chiseling

-calculating the correct angles

-planing the wood

In order to make our version of the chair different to Rietveld's, we decided that we would make the 'leg' of the chair shorter than the leg of the original Zig-Zag chair.  We look forward to seeing the final outcome.