THE RIETVELD SCHRODER HOUSE
Wim Crouwel [foreword]
Wim Crouwel [foreword]: THE RIETVELD SCHRODER HOUSE. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988. First English language edition. Quarto. Black cloth titled in white. Photo illustrated dust jacket. Printed endpapers. Color frontis. 128 pp. Fully illustrated in color and black and white. Jacket with a couple of short, closed tears to upper edge, otherwise a nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.5 x 10.5 hardcover book with 128 pages devoted to the Rietveld Schröderhuis in Utrecht, commissioned by Ms Truus Schröder-Schräder, designed by the architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, and built in 1924.
- Foreword: Wim Crouwel
- Introduction: Paul Overy
- Interview With Truus Schröder: Lenneke Buller & Frank Den Oudsten
- The Restoration Of The Rietveld Schröder House: Bertus Mulder
“The Rietveld Schröderhuis in Utrecht was commissioned by Ms Truus Schröder-Schräder, designed by the architect Gerrit Thomas Rietveld, and built in 1924. This small one-family house, with its flexible interior spatial arrangement, and visual and formal qualities, was a manifesto of the ideals of the De Stijl group of artists and architects in the Netherlands in the 1920s, and has since been considered one of the icons of the Modern Movement in architecture.
“The house is in many ways unique. It is the only building of its type in Rietveld’s output, and it also differs from other significant buildings of the early modern movement, such as the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier or the Villa Tugendhat by Mies van der Rohe. The difference lies in particular in the treatment of architectural space and in the conception of the functions of the building. Many contemporary architects were deeply influenced by the Schröder house and this influence has endured up to the present.
“The quality of the Rietveld Schröderhuis lies in its having produced a synthesis of the design concepts in modern architecture at a certain moment in time. Part of the quality of the house is the flexibility of its spatial arrangement, which allows gradual changes over time in accordance with changes in functions. At the same time the building has also many artistic merits, and its visual image has strongly influenced building design in the second half of the 20th century. The interiors and furniture are an integral part of its design and should be given due recognition.
“The Rietveld Schröderhuis was located on the edge of the city of Utrecht close to the countryside, at the end of a 20th century row of houses. It was built against the wall of the adjacent brick house. The area beyond the house remained undeveloped, because it contained 19th century Dutch defence lines, which were still in use at the time.” [UNESCO]
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld (1888 – 1964) seems possessed of two personalities, each so distinct that one might take his work to be that of more than one artist. The first personality is that seen in the craftsman cabinet-maker working in a primordial idiom, re-inventing chairs and other furniture as if no one had ever built them before him and following a structural code all of his own; the second is that of the architect working with elegant formulas, determined to drive home the rationalist and neoplastic message in the context of European architecture. The two activities alternate, overlap, and fuse in a perfect osmosis unfolding then into a logical sequence.
In 1918 Rietveld joined the “De Stijl” movement which had sprung up around the review of that name founded the year before by Theo van Doesburg. The group assimilated and translated into ideology certain laws on the dynamic breakdown of compositions (carrying them to an extreme) that had already been expressed in painting by the cubists: the “De Stijl” artists also carefully studied the architectonic lesson taught by the great Frank Lloyd Wright, whose influence was widely felt in Europe at that time.
Collaborating first with Robert van’t Hoff and Vilmos Huszar, then with Theo van Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren, Rietveld soon became one of the most distinguished interpreters of the neoplastic message. Rietveld broke with the 'De Stijl' movement in 1928 and switched to the Nieuwe Zakelijkheid. The same year he joined the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne.
Among his most important works are: the Schröder house at Utrecht (1924, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000); the “Row Houses” at Utrecht (1931-34); the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennial (1954); the sculpture pavilion in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller at Otterloo and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (1955). His furniture designs include the Red and Blue Chair (1917), the Dining Chair (1919), Chair for P. J. Elling (1920), the Cartridge (1922-24), the Schröder 1 (1923), the Wheelbarrow (1923), the Berlin Chair (1923), a Stool for children (1923), aDivan Table (1923), a Flat Stool (1923-24), aChair (1926), aMusic stand (1927), the Armchair for A. M. Hartog (1927), a Tubular Chair (1927), the Wouter Paap Armchair (1928-30), and the Zig-Zag Chair (1932-34).