Schröder house utrecht

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schröder house utrecht

Machine aesthetic; rectangular space play; the bare minimum of the modern architecture that was to be.

 

Banham R. Age of the Masters: A Personal View of Modern Architecture. Tantalizingly, it suggests a direction that twentieth-century Modernism might have gone in, although the building’s eccentric character and highly personal nature make it an unlikely ‘universal’ model.

In plan the house is unconventional for its time, but hardly exceptional nowadays.

Harper Collins UK., 2015.

 

 

If only because subtle and less subtle references to Rietveld's work can be found throughout the city. Both the large window and the small one perpendicular to it swing open, dissolving the corner and making you feel like you are outside. It is one of two works of world consequences by Rietveld - the other is his famous ‘red-blue’ chair and yet, when one looks at it there could hardly be a less likely candidate for fame.

The edges of these balconies and roof projections also provide additional horizontal lines. If you enjoy large cities, you can easily spend a week or so in Utrecht a/k/a “Dom city”. She did not want to take any chances on what she saw from her window. Initially with her three children, later with Gerrit Rietveld.

Her favourite spot in the house was the first floor, where she had the best view of the polder landscape and felt as if a weight had been lifted from her.

The elevations are composed of a collage of planes that overlap and glide over each other, and that frame, embrace, or act as supports for the horizontal lines of the projecting balconies.

Vertical lines, an essential component of De Stijl composition, are provided by slender posts that help support the balconies and projections of the building’s flat roof.

When his wife dies in 1957, Rietveld moved in with Schröder. Together, they pulled out all the stops, trying out new ideas in keeping with De Stijl.

The Style

De Stijl is an art movement named after the contemporary art magazine of the same name, founded in 1917.

Only the bathroom and WC have fixed partitions, so most of the first floor can be used as one large space. What she and her architect achieved, in a most adroit manner, was to transfer the imagery and ethos of cutting-edge two-dimensional abstract painting of relatively intimate scale to the realization of a three-dimensional, large-scale, inhabited, and ultimately functional object – a house.

The inspirational artistic movement was De Stijl, or neo-Plasticism, which had emerged in the Netherlands in 1917.

For example, Rietveld and Schröder create a quiet place to talk on the phone in the hall and shut out the cold.

Peace and safety

They also come up with wooden panels to darken the windows. However, various permutations are possible, including division of the floor into three bedrooms, by means of sliding and rotating partitions.

The exterior elevations are unconventional and exceptional.

The ground floor contains a kitchen, bedrooms or workrooms, and a central staircase leading to a first floor that is conceived as a flexible space. The vertical and horizontal lines are painted in strong primary colours, notably red and yellow, while the planes are painted in neutral white and grey. She turned to Gerrit Rietveld, a renowned furniture designer she had previously collaborated with, known for his avant-garde Red and Blue Chair.