Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

_{9. Schröder house, Utrecht, Netherlands (1924); architect: Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964). This small house was on the edge of Utrecht when it was built, on the end of a terrace of more conventional houses, looking out across the absolutely flat surrounding countryside. It was built for Mrs Schröder, a widow with children, who commissioned Rietveld, a furniture designer, to make a design that suited her ideas about how to live. On the upper floor an arrangement of folding and sliding screen walls made it possible to have a large open space, or to screen areas off to give individuals visual privacy — the screens did not allow much acoustic privacy. Rietveld was involved with the De Stijl group of artists, and the design of the house connects with their ideas about form, rather than with any traditional ideas about architecture or building. The appearance of the house was always extraordinary and novel, but its means of construction were fairly traditional, the walls being built of brickwork, rendered and painted.}

Conviction

The house has had tremendous influence in the decades since it was built, and among architects it is one of the best remembered buildings of the 1920s, despite its small size and inconspicuous location — outside the town centre of a provincial town in a small country. If it had been known that it would keep the Schröder name imperishably in the public eye, then that might have been a reason for building a house in this way, but of course the house’s reputation could not be predicted in advance, and this form of argument could not have been rationally allowed at the time that Mrs Schröder took the decision to build. What is more likely to have persuaded her of the rightness of the design was the force of Rietveld’s personal conviction. The client had strong convictions of her own, about the way that life should be lived. Every bedroom could work as a small living room, and all the rooms could be thrown together into one big space by folding away the walls, which were just thin screens.

When the rooms were enclosed, each one had a door to the outside, and a wash basin in it. This was not just an ordinary house that the designer managed to make artistically adventurous — it was designed to accommodate a fresh way of living. Nevertheless, the reason that the house looked the way it did was because of Rietveld’s involvement with the De Stijl group of artists (which included the painter Mondrian in its number) and he came to the project with experience in furniture design, following the principles of using lines and planes at right angles to one another, and primary colours. These might seem like odd principles to have adopted, but he did adopt them. His reasons for doing so need not detain us here, but involved a belief that by these means one could directly influence the state of the soul. It is quite possible that Mrs Schröder shared these convictions too, in which case she would have been persuaded by reason. If however she did not accept Rietveld’s premises but was impressed by his seriousness of purpose and believed that he would achieve something worthwhile, then she would have been persuaded in a way that is used more often than it is acknowledged. In effect this is the same as convincing someone of one’s authority to deal with the matter in hand, and it takes the general form of saying ‘trust me, I am able to judge this better than you are’.

Seduction