The Schroder House, an icon of modern architecture and the pinnacle of 1920s De Stijl style, was built by Gerrit Thomas Rietveld in Utrecht in 1924. Rietveld, born in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1888, attended architecture classes from 1908 to 1915. He started out his career as a furniture maker, opening his own office at the age of 23 in 1919. His furniture designs always expressed clear structure and function. The supports were simple and became increasingly more so; this is clear in his design of the so-called ‘Red-Blue chair’. The prototype for the Red-Blue chair was created in 1918, the same year in which Rietveld was introduced to the works of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work in the USA and to members of the De Stijl group, such as Theo Van Doesburg. De Stijl, translated directly as ‘The Style’ but meant as ‘the style to end all styles’, was the name of a publication on modern art and architecture in the Netherlands but was more so an artistic movement. It advocated the use of primary colours, right angles and straight lines. It was influenced by Cubism and Neo-Plasticism and members included abstract designers, sculptors, architects and painters, such as the famous Piet Mondrian. Member Van Doesburg was key in defining the principles of De Stijl style, calling for the “suppression of all form-ideas”, and in 1924 released 16 De Stijl points of plastic architecture, including that it should be ‘elementary, economic and functional; unmonumental and dynamic; anti-cubic’. These ideas are essential to bear in mind when looking at the Schroder House, and Van Doesburg’s key parts of architecture being the “plane, line and mass” are immediately visible.
However, the last and perhaps most important influence on the creation of the Schroder house was Truus Schroder-Schroder, the woman who the house was built for and in collaboration with. Rietveld met Truus in 1921, and she recognised his great enterprise and architectural potential. In 1923, Truus’ lawyer husband died, leaving her and her three children in a big house which she no longer wanted to live in, even though Rietveld designed a studio for her inside. She, like Rietveld, was interested in looking for a new progressive way of living, where dwelling was a verb rather than a noun. Truus then found a location for a new house, on the end of a pre-existing terrage, on the edge of the town, and here Rietveld design his first ever house.
There were some requirements Rietveld had to work with when designing this experimental house; Truus didn’t want to live on the ground floor as she felt this was too limiting, she wanted to be higher, closer to nature, and she wanted a house that wasn’t restricted in its spaces. Rietveld designed a first-floor living area layout to which Truus asked if the walls could be taken away. Rietveld allegedly replied “by all means”, and offered her sliding walls that would give her the freedom to rearrange spaces. The downstairs was for more functional activities – the kitchen, a study, a workroom and a space for deliveries to be dropped off. The interior was designed before the exterior, which was also changed upon Truus’ request; the initial design, like the first maquette which was a paitned mass of wood, seemed almost too simple for her. This first block model seemed far from the flowing and floating spaces achieved in the final design. Rietveld responded with far more developed drawings expressing strong linear qualities – his De Stijl membership showing through. It was these drawings that were submitted for planning permission, though the sliding walls were left out of the plan as they didn’t fit into the building regulations of the time.
Most of the house was built in a traditional style of plastered brickwork, although the brick load bearing walls are not reflected in the light appearance of the building. Rietveld didn’t use reinforced concrete all over, though it appears so, so that he could intervene in the building process, but it was used for foundations and balconies, so that they could be thinner. Wood was used for the door frames, window frames and floors, and steel in the windows and balconies was left exposed though its use in the masonry was hidden.
The exterior is what immediately links it to the De Stijl movement and made it a pinnacle of De Stijl architecture: the use of primary colours, the appearance of floating and the break-up of cubic form. Colour on the exterior is only on the linear elements, to emphasise their presence, while the larger planes are in different shades of grey and white. The aesthetics are clear but simple, and Rietveld achieves a non-repetitive design, nothing like the street or town had ever seen before. It stands as a stark lightness to its heavier surroundings, almost like a painting in brick and concrete.
The interior, in colour and in plan, is far livelier than the exterior. No materials were left in their natural colours – the upstairs was covered in black and white rubber, grey felt and red-painted floorboards; Truus, however, was not a fan, as she felt the colour divided the space and thus restricted the freedom of movement. Even Rietveld later ‘admitted to Schroder that he sometimes asked himself whether he had gone too far with the colour scheme, whether he had overstepped the boundary between architecture and painting’. Either way, it was an experiment, bound to exaggerate the style first time around.
The ground floor of the plan is more straight forward, with spaces separated linked only by overhead windows, and the first floor is what the building is famous for. It’s movable partitions and sliding walls allowed Truus to create entirely her own spaces. As there were no walls to hold up the ceiling, steel girders were put in place to hold up the flat roof. Both Truus and Rietveld wanted the fittings and furnishings to work together with the building, and Truus didn’t bring much with her from her old house. They built lots of storage space, and the sliding walls were put in behind cupboards. It is even possible to separate the sitting area from the stairwell with wood partitions. Light comes into the building from above in a skylight and from all sides, also furthering the idea of the break-up of form; one corner window is missing a steel bar so when open is a clear space, but when closed is perpendicular, emphasising how space continuously flows in the Schroder house.
The iconic Schroder House is arguably a work or art in its own right, with so much work going into the design and colour and creation, and perhaps shows Rietveld at his most inspired moment – he never really creates such innovative design again. The house is successful in creating special flow, through indoor and outdoor, open and closed and the colour and light throughout. It was a very pragmatic design, completely responsive to client, and though showing the same skills as used in his furniture design, marks Rietveld’s transition to architect. He was fond of his creation, and used a room in the house as an office for years as well as lived in it in his later life until he died in 1964. Recent efforts have been made to show that this house and the Red-Blue chair weren’t the only creations of Rietveld, though he was fully aware of being a ‘hostage to his own works’. Rumour has it that in the 1950s, a client, unsatisfied with the design given to them asked for a “real Rietveld”. The experimental design was early in his career, and the epitome of De Stijl principles, making it a pinnacle of Dutch modernism. Though he claimed to use the same building principles in other designs, he moved away from De Stijl in 1928, yet seems trapped in the style’s fame.
One reason the house is so famous is the link to Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings, born of the early De Stijl movement too. Many consider the works of Mondrian and Rietveld to be equivalent in artistic and architectural form. However, this comparison is fairly over-worked. Though both linked to Cubism, their philosophical bases differ; Mondrian’s interests are spiritual, about things that are conceptual, while Rietveld’s interests were experiential – about reality and sensory exploration.
Much of the Schroder house’s magic lies in its ability to give visual form space without enclosing it, the appearance of suspended planes and the relationship between varied planar and linear shaped. But the question is raised: could Rietveld follow Van Doesburg’s principle of endless variation if he had to design a terrace? Its stark comparison to the street aids its effective non-repetitious design.
Overall, the building is a successful experiment into De Stijl principles and into the desires of both client and architect; of flowing space, and as Rietveld said, “dwelling as a verb”, even though he was said to find the sliding walls more difficult in his old age. He gave Truus the ability to control her living environment, and she left the building to the public in her will. Today it is a pilgrimage for modern architecture lovers even though for Utrecht, he was always ‘the carpenter who built a house’.