However the chair is stabilized by dovetail joints between the seat and back, reinforcements with screws and nuts, as well as wooden wedges in the corners. Rietveld was very much aware of the discrepancy between the simple shape and the relatively complicated construction and said himself, it is not a chair but a “designer joke.” The actual goal of the design was to create a functional form which does not displace space but allows it to be perceived as a continuum; indeed, of Rietveld’s entire body of work the “Zig-Zag” represents the most economical example of such a form. It is an uncompromising transposition of minimal requirements onto a chair, reduced to such an extent that even the screws appear to be decorative. An idea that always accompanied the history of furniture design – of mechanically producing a chair from a single continuous form – led Rietveld to his first experiments with bent, spliced plywood in 1927.