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Operation Petticoat, 1959, by Blake Edwards

Jan Cornelis Rietveld (1919-86) was one of the six children of Dutch architect/designer Gerrit Rietveld and as such grew up in a very liberal and open household. Since Jan was bad in school his father sent him to a carpentry to learn the trades of carpentering (just like he had done in his youth), a training that was followed by employments in the practices of Willem van Tijen and Hugh Maaskant and Michiel Brinkman and Johannes van den Broek during the time of WWII. After the war he took evening classes in architecture at the Academie voor Bouwkunst in Amsterdam and graduated in 1949. Throughout his career Jan Rietveld was primarily concerned with the design of houses and apartment buildings. For the design process a good client-architect relationship was essential since each building was genuinely tailored to the requirements of the future inhabitants, probably also a reason why Rietveld only realized a small number of buildings outside the sphere of habitation. Many of his projects are documented in the monograph by Paul Salomons & Simone Doorman published by NAi Publishers in 1990, the only book-length study of the work of Jan Rietveld. The book documents the architect’s life and work with a particular focus on his houses and apartment buildings. Each project is featured in photographs, floor plans and cross sections, making comprehensible the very individual spatial programs of each project. A great book that nonetheless could use a more extensive successor!