Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

The third form of persuasion is different again, because it does not claim authority, but rather charms the client into suspending criticism. This might be because the design is very appealing, or it might be because the architect is very appealing. It is not unknown for architects literally to seduce their clients, or their clients’ wives. Frank Lloyd Wright eloped with the wife of one of his clients, and consequently had to abandon not only his family, but also his successful architectural practice. He was not the only one. Indeed Rietveld grew very close to Mrs Schröder, and set up a studio in the built-in garage of her house, and displayed his furniture designs there. The charmer in effect says ‘indulge me, this is what I want, and you will love it because it is my work’. The power of both authority and charm come from either instructing or more gently persuading someone to stop reasoning, and accept advice. Individuals are more susceptible than are committees, and buildings commissioned by committees are correspondingly less idiosyncratic, more reasonable. A housing committee would never have commissioned the Schröder house. A committee formed to promote the ideals of De Stijl might have done.

A multiplicity of meanings

This little house neatly illustrates a variety of ways in which a building can have meaning. For the children who grew up in it, extraordinary though it may have been, it was home, and would have been a comforting and reassuring place to return to after a day at school. For the widow Schröder it was a basis for a fresh start and a new way of life after the death of her still young husband. For Rietveld it was an opportunity to put into practice on an unprecedented scale the ideas that he had been working on with his artist friends, and he did what it was necessary to do. For the neighbours the building must have seemed odd and unaccountable, and would have made no sense at all at first, but it gradually became familiar to them as a landmark at the edge of the town, looking out (as it did then) over flat open fields. In the 21st century the house looks ‘ahead of its time’, whatever that might mean, and if we were to think that we could guess at its date by looking at its style, then we would certainly guess some time after 1924, and might admire it for its apparent prescience. On the other hand we might look at its level of consumption of fuel and feel the need to condemn it on environmental grounds. There is one small building here, but many different ways to respond to it, so different sets of feelings are generated by it. Since architecture is what happens when we encounter a building and bring a culture to bear on it, we could say that this one building belongs to, or produces, a number of architectures. It makes a gesture in more than one cultural context. If we look at it as a work of architecture of the home, then it is a gesture of freedom and emancipation for its inhabitants, in which they can invent their lives, liberated from the conventional constraints of a bourgeois family. If we look at it as an element in the architecture of the city of Utrecht then we can see it as a gesture of attention-seeking, which was welcome here at the edge of town, acting rather like the sort of marker that a city gate-post might once have been. If we look at it as part of the development of modernist architecture, then it is a gesture of great importance, marking one of the crucial moments when the artistry of the building was evident, despite the fact that the form of the building did not derive from earlier buildings, but from more abstract ideas. Which of these is the real meaning? They are all real meanings, and not one of them can be attributed directly to the architect. If we were to want to know about what it meant to him, then we would need to immerse ourselves in the literature of theosophy, and learn about Madame Blavatsky’s descriptions of the spirit world. These days not many of us are inclined to do so, but even if we did retrieve Rietveld’s original understanding of the building, that would not invalidate the other readings, or make them meaningless.