Dutch designer Gerrit Thomas Rietveld is known as an apologist for the neoplasticist trend in European design. His work is an excellent example of how familiar and popular things and forms can be simplified into a new form.
Rietveld was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on 24 June 1888. Coming from a craftsman and entrepreneurial background, from the age of 11 he helped his carpenter father in the workshop, making furniture that was traditional for the time. In 1899, he enrolled in evening school (Klaarhammer course) and in 1904 began working as a draughtsman for a local jeweller.
It is interesting to note that Gerrit studied design – drawing, composition, modelling – on his own. The desire to change familiar objects and replace the traditional with the new led the master to change his thinking from a craft type (repeating successful models) – to a creative type (making his own models).
Gerrit Rietveld was also influenced by the young Dutch artists who formed the famous De Stijl (Style) group. His main collaborators were Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian.
The master’s first and most famous design was the so-called red and blue chair by Gerrit Rietveld. The distinctive design and colour scheme fitted in well with the concept of neoplasticism that the De Stijl group was developing.
Among the buildings of historical and biographical significance is the unique Schroeder House designed by Gerrit Rietveld – a very austere, almost monochromatic, house without walls, with expressive rectangular forms and an extremely rational layout.
As a widow, Truss Schröder realised that she could no longer live in her own house. She turned to Gerrit Rietveld to create something completely new for her – a house without walls and stereotypes, free of boundaries and architectural rules. The craftsman, who had hitherto only created furniture, decided to follow the principle of absolute functionality in this project. When the client approached Rietveld, she knew exactly what she wanted: a lot of colour, a lot of detail, like in Piet Mondrian’s paintings, and at the same time a clarity and simplicity of space that would liberate rather than restrict her. As a result, the famous Schröder Haus appeared in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 1924. It can rightly be considered a phenomenon at the heart of modernist architecture.
This small detached house, with its flexible spatial layout and visual qualities, was a manifesto of the ideals of the De Stijl group of artists and architects. Founded in 1917, the movement was named after the magazine that became the mouthpiece for the ideals of modern art and architecture in the Netherlands at the time. Its adherents “strived for the universal, as individuality had lost its meaning. Abstraction, precision, geometry, the pursuit of artistic purity and asceticism…”.
After Mr Schröder’s death, his wife Trüss felt the need to move to another flat. Among the architects, she chose Gerrit Rietveld. At the time, he was not yet building any houses, but was designing furniture. However, both Mrs Schroeder and Rietveld adhered to progressive ideals, which included a passionate commitment to a new openness about relationships in the family and truth in emotional life. The bourgeois notions of respectability and decency of those years, with their emphasis on discipline, hierarchy and restraint, were to be shattered by an architectural design that countered each of these aspects.
Truss envisioned a house that would be free of association and could create a connection between inside and outside. It would be difficult to find another client so uncompromising. Mrs Schröder immediately set her requirements: every room had to have plumbing and drainage, the bed had to fit in at least two different positions, and every room had to have an exit to the outside.
Gerrit Rietveld put in all his knowledge, experience and was able to fulfil every one of these requests. The result is a true masterpiece. Great attention was paid to detail, including the colours of the walls. At first glance, the house may appear to be a painted canvas, but each area is painted for specific, practical reasons. The front door, for example, is black because it is used most often and gets dirty quickly.
The skeleton of the house consists of reinforced concrete slabs and steel profiles. The walls are made of brick and plaster, the window frames, doors and floors of wood. The facades are a collage of planes and lines that appear to move past each other.
There is little difference between inside and outside. Straight lines and planes flow from the outside to the inside, while maintaining the same colour palette and surface quality. Even the windows are hinged to prevent them from opening more than 90 degrees, in order to maintain the strict geometric standards of the building.
This Schröder Haus became an icon of the De Stijl movement because of its unusual, even radical for the time, approach to design. Rietveld gave a new spatial meaning to the simple and rectangular planes of the individual architectural elements: slabs, pillars and beams that were put together in a balanced ensemble.
And the main feature of the house was its ability to transform beyond recognition.
In designing the house, the architect had to resort to certain tricks. The principles of urban planning required a clear floor plan, but the peculiarity of the house was precisely the lack of one. The flexibility of the space meant that there was no hierarchical arrangement of rooms in the plan. The ground floor was designed quite standard, but this was only a forced pretense, necessary for the local authorities to accommodate the house. In fact, with the exception of the kitchen and Rietveld’s studio, the dining room, living room and reading room on the lower level were never intended for use.
It is the top floor, which is officially an attic (if city officials are asking), that is the space where all of Rietveld’s ideas were realised. The sliding and rotating panel walls could be completely folded and parted, creating a free space. When they were in place, the upper level consisted of three bedrooms, a bathroom and a living room. Between this and the open-plan state, there were many possible permutations, each providing a different space.
The ideal Rietveld house is spacious, simple and functional. To achieve this, the architect came up with many clever solutions. For example, the ceiling was painted black to turn an interior window into a mirror. The stairs were hidden behind sliding doors, creating a quiet space in the hallway for the telephone. Wooden panels were used as blinds.
In 1924, the location of the house was considered to be on the outskirts of Utrecht. With this in mind, Rietveld designed a corner window on the first floor which, when opened, formed a kind of balcony and provided a beautiful view of the fields stretching as far as the eye could see. It was a favourite place for the owner of the house. She spent so much time on the upper level that Rietveld installed a receiver for her so that she could talk to guests at the door without having to go downstairs.
When a four-lane motorway was built in front of the house in the 1960s, Rietveld said that the building could be demolished because what connected the inside to the outside had been destroyed.
However, Truss Schröder lived in her house until her death in 1985. Rietveld, who became her lover, ran an architectural studio there. After his wife’s death, he eventually moved in with the widow Schroeder and spent the rest of his life there – until 1964. After his death, the house was restored to its original state by one of Rietveld’s pupils, Bertus Mulder, and a museum was opened there.
Take a closer look at this house – how modern it looks today, a century after it was built. This is what true architecture should be – not outdated, but in fact becoming more meaningful with time.
Photos: Taschen, Sergiusz Woropaj
