Rietveld, Schroder House, Utretcht, 1924

• Materials

  walls: brick and plaster; window frames and doors: Wood. The structure was supported with steel girders.
• Location:

  Utrecht, Netherlands
• Patron:

  Mrs Truus Schröeder –Schräder
• Description:

  A small two-storey domestic dwelling in Utrecht built for widower, Mrs. Truus Schröeder –Schräder. It is typical of Modernism in design: white, grey, black, and primary colours appear on the exterior and interior (including furnishing) to create an artistic unity.
• Style:

  De Stijl (Modernism/Modern Movement)
• The Schröder House is an icon of Modern Movement architecture which manifests the ideas of De Stijl – harmony, order, balance, proportion. Geometric shapes and form radiating from a central core. Modernism was a new formal language of 20th-century architecture. In art, the move from abstraction towards abstract art characterised Modernism, and in architecture found its clearest expression in the International Style/Modernism.
• The ‘newness’ of this form is perhaps most convincingly realised by looking at its incongruity alongside its neighbours.
• Space:

  Space itself became a fundamental material and expressed a new age, a Machine Age, and was characterised by 3 key features according to Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in 1932:

  1. The expression of volume rather than mass
  2. 2. Dynamic balance rather than imposed symmetry.
  3. 3. The elimination of applied ornament.
• By the early 1920s forms of abstraction appeared across Europe and its dominant form – The International Style – was characterised by white, geometric forms with extensive use of glass and steel. It spoke a language that attempted to see the world anew in the aftermath of WWI.
• Colour

  The colour white was a characteristic of Modernism and white with accents in primaries was a characteristic of De Stijl.
• Composition:

  The free plan arose from structural frames of steel and concrete and the intention to open-up the composition. The main living space is open plan and can be divided with hinged, folding partitions. Although the ‘free-plan’ was associated with Le Corbusier’s third point of his Five Points of Architecture, 1927 (so a little later), the open, flowing space of the free plan was central to pioneering Modernist architect, Rietveld.
• Mondrian’s belief that pure geometric shapes led to some higher universal consciousness filtered into many works of art and architecture at the time: the square would become the dominant form and translated from Mondrian’s grid-like paintings into its greatest architectural expression: The Schröeder –Schräder House, 1924. The only architectural manifestation of the De Stijl, similarly, its planar forms held in perfect equilibrium to achieve an overall unity.
• The basic design of Schröder House was typical of Modernism, but with its De Stijl style it was particularly pertinent to the Netherlands, where the philosophy met with the country’s austere religious values of Calvinism.
• This small domestic dwelling in Utrecht built for Mrs Truus Schröeder –Schräder embodies several familiar ‘plastic’ principles: horizontal/vertical lines; dominant off-white palette with grey, black and primary colours. The same primary colours reappear in the interior furnishings to create an overall harmony. The basic design was as Modern and stripped-back as Netherlandish religiosity.
• Rietveld wanted to construct the house out of concrete, but this was too expensive for such a small building so the foundations and the balconies are the only parts of the building made from concrete.
• Walls are made of load-bearing bricks faced with plaster
• Window frames and doors are made from wood as well as the floors, which were supported by wooden beams. The frames are thin as though made from steel. The flat roof is also a wooden structure.
• Windows are hinged so that they are able to open 90 degrees to the wall (to maintain pure geometric lines).
• Steel I-beams support roof and balconies
• For the first time Rietveld installed florescent lighting tubes which he set perpendicular to one another to emphasise geometricity.
• Vertical curtains were avoided, and special shutters were made to maintain horizontality.
• Industrial radiators were used because pipes ran horizontally. The doors in the house are wider than standard; Mrs Schröder wanted to avoid verticality as far as possible.
• The Schröder House is a Modern Movement house which manifests the ideas of the De Stijl – harmony, order, balance, proportion. Geometric shapes and form radiating from a central core and there is a dominant off-white colour palette with grey, black, and primary colours.
• The two-storey house has a ‘transformable’ kitchen/dining/living area, studio space and reading room on the bottom, and the second floor contained bedrooms and storage space, only separated by portable partitions. The upper floor is one open space around the staircase. It can be divided into three bedrooms and a sitting room by sliding panels.
• “We found it essential to begin with the plan and to ask, what’s the best view, where does the sun rise?” (Truus Schröder).