HOPERAPERTA

 Schröder House

Just an an.iconic lecture for an iconic project

by Patrizia Catalano

The Schroder House in Utrecht stands today as a vibrant manifesto for De Stijl movement, one of the most important currents in the great stream of 20th-century Modernism. Its creator, Gerrit Rietveld, constructed it in 1924 after embracing the beliefs of such associates as artist/designer Theo van Doesburg; architects JJP Oud and Cor van Eesteren; and painter Piet Mondrian, fouder of (the related) Neoplasticism. Each of them, over a period spanning roughly 1917 to 1931, made an outstanding contribution to the revival of the plastic and visual arts, influencing the entire culture of Europe, from the Bauhaus in Germany to French Purism and Russian Suprematism

The Netherlands’ neutral status during World War I had not protected its people from suffering. Van Doesburg railed against the extreme individualism that he believed was the war’s root cause and ‘the whole swindle of lyricism and sentiment’ that were its cultural manifestations. In the new era, he wrote in the first issue (1917) of the journal De Stijl (The Style), ‘Essence replaces appearance. The indistinct becomes defined, shade turns to colour. The illusory space becomes space. The illusory depth, actual depth. Passion becomes reason, war becomes law and nature, style.’ Thus it was that the Dutch avant-garde sought a new ethical and universal language, a purified art that would lead to a renewal of society. De Stijl’s aim was the achievement of social, as much as aesthetic, harmony. Indeed, art would cease to be necessary once it had been fully integrated into the lives of citizens.

The young Rietveld, having trained as a cabinetmaker, first contributed to the Neoplastic movement by making architectural models for Oud and Van Eesteren, and furniture for Van Doesburg, Robert Van’t Hoff and himself (the ‘Red-Blue Chair’ of 1918 being the most celebrated piece). It was while delivering one of his armchairs that Gerrit met Truus Schröder-Schräder, his contemporary and a graduate of the Technical University of Hanover. From this encounter grew an intense and lasting intellectual and emotional bond. Thoughtful and curious, Schröder-Schräder was caught up in the artistic and cultural ferment of the time, but when the 20-year-old met the young Rietveld, she was on the point of marrying a respectable middle-class lawyer. Their relations would prove decidedly turbulent: despite three children born within the union, Schröder-Schräder abandoned her husband three times before his death in 1923. To emancipate herself from her stifling bourgeois existence, in 1920 she designed with Rietveld an alternative home for her and her children, incorporating many De Stijl principles and employing a radically new use of space. Once widowes, she decided to build the house for both of them, by now lovers. Rietveld, however, joined her there only after his wife’s death in 1958.

A central De Stijl principle was to blur the distinction between fine and applied arts. Van Doesburg, for example, regarded furniture as sculpture for the home and architecture as a kind of walk-in painting. Indeed, the Schröder House feels like a three-dimensional, non-objective painting in which the quality of harmony through asymmetrical balance has been supremely realised. The first surprising thing about the house is the unity between its exterior and interior. Far from being a banal container, the three perimeter walls point up the apartment’s internal structure. Instead of a solid mass punctuated by holes – the traditional domestic form – the façade announces itself as a series of interconnected, transitional zones, marked by projecting balconies, door – and window frames, railings and overhanging roofs. Immediately apparent, too, is the bold way the methods and materials of construction have been exposed – also revolutionary in its day.

The building is attached to a row of dull terraced apartment blocks, whose rigid quadrangular layout is observed on the ground floor – mainly to comply with Utrecht’s strict building regulations. All convention is abandoned, however, in the storey that lies above the study, laboratory and kitchen. Large glazed panels blend with orthogonal and independent wall surfaces painted by Rietveld himself, using primary colours plus white, black and various shades of grey. Thanks to the skilful use of sliding and folding panels, spectacular changes of the spatial layout are achievable: bedrooms, study, dining room and living room can become a single large environment. Platforms placed at different heights create a sense of rhythm; so too does the felt and linoleum on the floor and glass, wood and steel on the walls. The dynamism is reminiscent of a Mondrian painting: a highly individual space has been fashioned from a universal language of rectangles, lines and an elementary palette.

Even the furniture functions as an integral part of the whole, and indeed many of the tables, benches and modular cupboards were designed by the architect and built in to the structure, Tellingly, Rietveld’s commentary on the design principles that underlie his ‘Red-Blue Chair’ can be just as appropriately applied to his architecture: ‘I have tried to make each part of this chair absolutely simple, this is to say endowing it with an absolutely primary form in the accordance with the theory of function and with the material, hence the form most conducive to achieving harmony in relation to all the rest. The task of manufacturing is to connect the various pieces, without any mutilation, so that no one piece prevails over the others, and non is subordinate.’

Rietveld probably do not realise that here he was creating the first true ‘archetype’ of modern architecture, unlike, say, Le Corbusier’s Pavillon de l’Esprit Nouveau (1924-5), or Mies van der Rohe’s German Pavilion (1929), in that both these have spawned countless imitations. The Schröder House remains a work into itself, displaying an unparalleled sincerity and sober purity, perfect and unrepeatable.