Rietveld Schröeder House (1924). Prins Hendriklaan, Utrecht. Holland
The Rietveld Schröeder House (1924)
This house is the result of the effort and good understanding between architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld and owner, Truus Schröeder-Schräder to which must be added a loving relationship between them. Still today, the world famous Rietveld Schröeder House is a strikingly modern apparition among the surrounding traditional brown brick houses at Prins Hendriklaan street in Utrecht, where is based.
With the first house he ever built the former furniture maker Gerrit Rietveld immediately established his name as an architect. The problem of the house today is that in front of it there is a highway which was raised at the beginning of the 1960’s of the last century and drastically put an end to what would be a wonderful view: the flat and bucolic landscape of Holland, with its dense or frayed clouds, which slide in continuous movement and creating magnificent panoramic skies. This view was one of the reasons why Rietveld and Truss had originally chosen this place for the house.
The house is celebrated since it was completed in 1924 drawing a lot of attention. Peers and professionals around the world responded with great enthusiasm. Various international architectural and visual art journals ran articles on it. The house has been an icon of modern art and architecture and listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000: “An icon of the Modern Movement in architecture and a outstanding expression of human creative genius in its purity of ideas and concepts as developed by De Stijl movement. With its radical approach to design and the use of space, the Rietveld Schröeder House occupies a seminal position in the development of architecture in the modern age.” Even today is the most visited monument in Utrecht and not only by architects or art historians.
Rietveld-Schröder House (1924)
Natalie Dubois, curator of the Design and Applied Arts Department at Utrecht Centraal Museum explains: “The house was completed in a turbulent time. Industrialization and modernization were having a palpable impact, the city of Utrecht was growing with leaps and bounds, and the cultural climate enjoyed a significant boost through the presence of the National railways headquarters, the Jaarbeurs (trade fair complex) and various art associations and journals. This modern era before the depression of the 1930’s formed a fertile milieu for the ground-breaking designs by Rietveld”.
Utrecht in 1890 (Photocrome print)
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was born in 1888 in Utrecht from a devout Christian Reformed background. His father was a furniture maker and Gerrit at the age of eleven was no longer sent to school but went to work with his father. He didn’t like to work in his father’s workshop, and later he found another job as designer for the goldsmith Carel Beeger. There he met the designer Jan Eisenlöffel and the watercolorist and illustrator Erich Wichmaan, who introduced him to modern arts and crafts which inspired him to take that direction in furniture carpentry. At the same time he attended evening courses given by the architect Piet Klaarhamer who was a socially engaged person who wanted to put his architecture in the service of the working class. He looked up to the prominent architect Hendrick Berlage, one of the fathers of Modern Architecture, as an example, and taught Rietveld the basics of architecture matters. Finally, he opened his own carpenter workshop in 1917.
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld
In preceding years to the building of the Rietveld-Schröeder house, Rietveld had attained a modest position in the international avant-garde. He had joined De Stijl, the important Dutch artistic movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. The principles of De Stijl advocated pure abstraction and universality by a reduction to the essentials of the form and color; they simplified visual compositions to vertical and horizontal, usually straight lines, squares and rectangles and by using only black, white and primary colors. De Stijl was also the name of a journal that was published by the Dutch painter, designer, writer, and critic Theo van Doesburg that served to propagate the group’s theories and works. The principal members were the painters Mondrian (the best known), Vilmos Huszar and Van der Leck and the architects Rietveld, Robert van’t Hoff and J.J.P. Oud. De Stijl’s influence was perhaps felt most noticeably in the architecture field, helping give rise to the International Style of the 1920s and 1930s. For example, the architect Mies van der Rohe acknowledged the influence on his work. It should be noted that the Rietveld Schröeder House is the only building to have been created completely according to De Stijl principles.
The architect Robert van’t Hoff was the one to link Rietveld with De Stijl: “He experienced his contact with De Stijl as a liberation from the isolation he felt trapped in. Looking back in later years he said that he sometimes felt like he was going mad. De Stijl was thus of immeasurable significance to him, though he had already come to his fundamental insight that space is the most important aspect of architecture and design.” And in 1923 the great German architect Bruno Taut wrote to the architect and Rietveld’s friend J.J.P.Oud: “The visit to Utrecht was very congenial and instructive. I was received very warmly and kindly, specially by Rietveld. He is a very precious person, more than I have ever met before. He alone can replace the entire Bauhaus.”
Gerrit Rietveld. Child’s High Chair (1918-1922)
Theo Van Doesburg and J.J.P Oud incorporated his furniture pieces in their interior designs. Van Doesburg published his famous Child’s High Chair in 1919, and from that moment on Rietveld was counted among the international avant-garde. Rietveld designed the illustrated chair for H.J. Schelling’s first child, born in 1918, but was not executed until 1922. The Child’s High Chair is considered a key work in Rietveld’s work because its construction and coloring anticipate the design of his famous Red Blue Chair, which was also designed in 1918 but was given its characteristic coloring in 1923.
Gerrit Rietveld. The Schröeder Table (1924)
The main Rietveld’s furniture features are that he deconstructed his furniture pieces into separate components, which he then reunited as independent elements. The stylistic influence of De Stijl is mainly revealed in the use of asymmetry and De Stilj primary colors.
Red Blue Chair, (1918, painted in 1923)
In their most known chairs, initially he only painted the ends of the horizontal slats. It was around 1923 that he expanded the colors range: white, black, yellow, red and blue. Natalie Dubois points out: “This use of color is more than just a cheerful highlight; Rietveld in fact used the colors to improve the design. By giving the back and the seat its own dominant color, he reinforced the sense of the autonomy of parts. The chair so-called Red Blue Chair has become an icon of the 20th-century design.”
Around 1923 Rietveld introduced two new formal elements in his furniture designs: asymmetry and construction with flat panels, an example is the so-called Berlin Chair which gets its name because it was specially designed for the exposition room by Rietveld and Huszar in the show in Berlin in 1923. This chair is an spatial construction consisting of different dimension planks, combined at right angles in such a way that the surfaces run parallel to and cross over each other. Years later he turned into minimalist with the Zig Zag Chair (1934) designed without legs, made by four flat wooden tiles that are merged in a Z-shape using. The Rietveld’s chairs have frequently opened the debate of whether they are in fact comfortable or not.
Gerrit Rietveld. Zig Zag Chair (1934)
His furniture was hailed by Theo van Doesburg as ‘the new sculpture’, and inspired many of his contemporaries just as it continues to inspire today’s designers. The Rietveld’s forniture has and has had so many replicas and imitations worldwide and even today seems modern.
However, Rietveld wanted to be an architect, but he was trained to be a furniture maker as a way to earn money. He said in 1959: “After working for some time with the goldsmith I acquired some perspective again, a new view on architecture. So I started making all sorts of things for myself, but I did want to have some idea of where this was heading… I immediately felt that you shouldn’t work with the mass of material any more, but with this space contained inside the mass, so that you had to separate a space from the overall space by means of boundaries that were not complete.” According to Ida Van Zijl, who is an specialist in RietveldIt, it was not until 1924 that he was ready for some serious work as an architect. The Truss Schröeder commission was and excellent opportunity to prove it.
Gerrit and Truus
The story it can be explain as the encounter of the architect, the client and a house. A story like that of Frank Lloyd Wright with his Taliesin House. Natalie Dubois considers that “the encounter of Gerrit Rietveld and Truus Schröeder-Schrader was to have a far-reaching impact on their personal lives as much as on the history of architecture.”
Gerrit Rietveld and Truus Schröeder
Truss Schröeder was born in 1889, the daughter of a well-to-do and classic Catholic family. After leaving the boarding school she trained to be a pharmacist’s assistant. She spent six months abroad to finish her upbringing, staying with an open-minded London family who took her to museums, and included her in discussions on art and architecture. Finally she attended lectures for a few months at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover.
At the age of 22 she married the lawyer Frits Schröeder. They lived with their three children in a big house, a stately 19th-centrury dwelling on Biltstraat in Utrecht, with a lot of furniture, all very Baroque, with high ceilings and verticals lines and a grandiosity that she hated. Her preferences were for simplicity and sobriety.
She first met Rietveld in 1921 after her husband ordered an office desk from the furniture maker Johannes Rietveld, Gerrit’s father. The young Gerrit delivered the desk on Bilstraat to help his father. The desk was not of Truss’s liking: “It was like all desks were, you know, robustly made, well shaped, but not at all what I was seeking in life.” She was more interested in the furniture by modernist architects such as Berlage. In later meetings it is suppose that both would often fall into conversation about modern architecture and design. It became clear then that they shared many views and interests and similar ideas. Also similarities in their personal life, Rietveld and Truss both consciously rejected their religious and traditional background and sought out the modern in art as well in a way of life.
She had a difficult marriage, for example different views about upbringing and schooling the children: Truus wanted her children to attend a Montessori school and began to distance from Catholic faith and her husband was a very traditional man. Her husband’s death in 1923 opened up perspective of a new life for her and the children. She wanted to move to a small apartment and asked Rietveld to help her to find another home in another place. He went far beyond that: he proposed her to build a new house for her and the children. They both found the plot of land, at the edge of the city, in Prins Hendriklann on an abandoned corner.
She had clear ideas about her new house and were translated to Rietveld during the design phase wanting to be part of the design process, “given her ambition of becoming an interior architect”, as Ida Van Zilj points out.
Anyway, her exact contribution in the house has been a mater of debate for decades. Was she a co-designer? Some authors argue that the house could not have been built without her strong personality. According to Van Zilj she knew what he wanted: contact with nature, privacy, central skylight, bedroom on the upper floor. So, “without her intervention the house would have had a closed-off layout, and there wouldn’t have been a reason for Rietveld to extend the open interior layout to the exterior. Apparently, the design process was so inspiring for both Rietveld and Schröeder that they each hit upon exceptional ideas.” According to Truss’s daughter Han, it was particularly “her under standing of human needs that stood. But she was a shadow figure, beside and specially behind, a difficult position.”
No one knows when both became romantically involved. Ida Van Zilj thinks that it possibly happened after the death of her husband and during the construction of the house. The problem was that Rietveld was a married man and father of six children. So, the topic was a kind of taboo. Truu’s children were aware of the situation and accepted it. Rietveld’s children reacted in different ways. In the 1990’s Rietveld’s younger daughter claimed that all the stories about her father and Truus Schröeder were gossip, that her father adored her mother and Truus was simple like an “aunt” for the family. Her sister Bep felt that their father had abandoned the family.
The facts are that Rietveld kept his studio at the Rietveld Schröeder house from 1924 on, perhaps on Truus’s insistence. Many of the projects in the period until 1933, when Rietveld move his office to Oudegracht, bear both their names, so according to Ida Van Zilj “designing the house must have been a fantastic experience for both of them. Rietveld thought it only natural to present her as the co- architect of the Schröeder house and other projects, and he always lauded her capacities.” Truus said years later: “This house was our child.”
Rietveld Schröeder House (1924)
The sale of the Bilstraat House and the inheritance settlement provided Truss with enough resources to finance the project. Within a period of around seven months, the land was bought, the design was made, and a building permit was applied and obtained. By the end of the year, 1924, the dwelling was sufficiently finished for Truus and her three children to move in at the start of 1925”.
Talking about the house, Truus said:”Rietveld wasn’t too concerned about the material, the architect’s real material is space and space need to be delineated clearly inside, but also outside… He did so beautifully here.” Vera de Lange explains:”The new house had to be efficient for the new, free life to come. There was no room for needless decoration. Light, space, flexibility and sobriety formed the key terms for the house that would become known as the Rietveld Schröeder house: a house that would break with every architectural convention”. The design seems like a three-dimensional realization of a Mondrian paining
The Rietveld Schröder House (1924)
The house is relatively small, I imagined it bigger, but very well proportioned. Consists of two floors, plus a cellar and a flat roof. It covers a surface area of approximately ten by seven meters and six meters high. The hull is made of brick, reinforced in some places with iron I-beams, bitumen roof covering, wooden window and door frames, and balconies made of reinforced concrete. Everything is painted in black, white, grey, red, yellow or blue creating a coherent unity and a enjoyable space with the so-called De Stijl colors.
The Rietveld Schroeder House (1924)
Truus said the house is a “marvelous design because of the relationship it creates between the private interior and the world around”. The house express the desire for openness, the wish of freedom that both shared. Every room had to be multifunctional. Ida Van Zilj points out: “An essential part of the revolutionary interior was created almost accidentally, when Truus asked if the walls that separate the rooms could be done away. Then, Rietveld designed a system of sliding panels to divide the open space into separate bedrooms at night.” Nowadays that seems normal to us but at that time it was not. The three-dimensional open form of the outside walls changed the relationship between the house’s interior and exterior. Instead of a rigid separation, there are fluid transitions between outside and inside, with various ”intermediate spaces” as Rietveld called them”. He said:” The main point here is that we were no longer working with mass, with the building mass, but with the interior space that could be continued outwards. You can already see it in the floor plans, which are also completely open”. So, the Dutch climate with its cloud panoramas and permanently changing light makes an strong effect inside. Anyway, the basic shape of the house is a closed block, whose sides are opened up by the architect to form several surfaces and lines that become independent elements through the use of color.
The Rietveld Schröeder House (1924)
She lived in the house for sixty years until her death in 1985 (96 years old), with her children, with Rietveld and at the end alone. She only left the house a year, in 1936, during which time the house accommodated a small Montessori primary school and he lived across the road. Rietveld moved with her after his wife died in 1957. In 1964 he died in the house (76 years old). Then, she devoted to his memory collecting Rietveld’s design drawings, photos and correspondance and piles of all kinds of books and newspapers clippings about his work.
To assure the proper management of the house and to preserve it for the future, Truss set up the Rietveld Schröder House Fundation in 1970, which is still the owner of the house today, but the management of the house was transferred to Centraal Museum in 1987 and it has been open to the public ever since. I strongly recommend the visit.
Àngels Ferrer i Ballester