Gerrit Rietveld: Wealth of Sobriety
Center for Architecture
May 7–September 2, 2026
New York
A small but stimulating exhibition of architectural photography, emerging from a collaboration between art historian Barry Bergdoll and Dutch architectural photographer Arjan Bronkhorst. The show of fifteen images is a distillation of an eponymous tome (Arjan Bronkhorst and Ida van Zijl, LecturaCultura, 2018) featuring four hundred images of under-archived Rietveld homes. While few of these buildings approach the avant-gardism of the 1924 Schröder House, they each feature a signature rigor, developed in part thanks to extended discussions with patrons.
Bronkhorst is no stranger to the genre. He is devoted to documenting building interiors as rendered in previous work on churches and palaces along the Amsterdam canals. Crucially, his work argues for an “interior” that expands beyond decoration or ornamentation. Rather, it evokes the sensibility of its dweller, the ways that “habitus” is conditioned by their inhabitation of architecture. Rietveld’s own practice emerges as an ideal format for this study. The architect began as a furniture designer, and his later architectural work continues to interrogate small-scale craftsmanship and detail. The material must make itself felt. Some forms of architecture obsessively suppress that fact: Rietveld works with it to fine effect. And now, Bronkhorst, another craftsman, chronicles these subtleties with careful sensitivity that accentuates the architect’s early training.
The houses we never knew are fine and understated. A photograph displays visual ambiguity between two otherwise matched kitchen-closet doors, one fully volumetric while the other manages to look more planar. In another case, the stained wood of a double door meets up more pictorially with the grey-painted inside of a hinged, mirrored outer door. The primary colors plus black, grey, and white, so prominent in the famous Schröder House, are not the only features that allude to painting. Views from one space to another count as well.