Gerrit Rietveld’s Berlin chair is among his most iconic furniture designs, and his first asymmetrical chair, predating the Steltman chair by four decades. This asymmetry was radical for the time and is the materialization of ideas Rietveld had begun to explore with the design of the Red-Blue chair. In 1959, in reference to his 1919 design for a sideboard, he recalled “You see I would have very much liked to make this sideboard asymmetrical, because I felt that even this symmetry was actually too closely tied to the mass and I would have preferred to set it freely in space, but that was still too difficult at the time.” A chair presented less of a challenge in engineering, and in 1923 he was able to realize this ambition when he collaborated with De Stijl artist Vilmos Huszár on the Space-Color-Composition for the Juryfreie Kunstschau in Berlin. This was a scale model of an interior that gained visibility and influence through publication. Of the various furniture designs employed in this interior, the Berlin chair was the only one to be produced as a full-scale functional model, in both left and right-handed versions. There is one known extant period example of the Berlin chair in the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and Gerard van de Groenekan produced a only a very limited number of Berlin chairs in the 1950s.