It is one of the icons of Modernism, an astonishing building categorised as 'De Stijl' style, constructed in 1924. The building recreates the playful, illusory, criss-crossing of planar graphics and colours that define the era dominated by the painter Mondrian, all in a wondrous 3D reality that engages one with a repetitive satisfaction. Space is defined by directional planes, juxtaposed into a floating arrangement that dazzles the eye and entertains the spirit. It is a remarkable play of layered intersections that surprisingly shape fluid, flexible, functional space and place. Some interior panels slide aside, suggestively proposing the possibility for all panels to be somehow rearranged, with them seen perhaps as being transitory; as only having come together momentarily to make the house as we now see it, ready to be re-assembled into a new, floating arrangement, in the same way as today's transformers cleverly re-shape themselves.
Yet, in spite of this illusive, ad hoc quality, the composition is considered and deliberate, tweaked with as sure an intent as a Mondrian grid. The house is as carefully arranged as the pieces of Rietveld's equally famous 'Red and Blue' chair, designed at much the same time. It is a chair that puzzlingly seems to be remembered as a red chair with a black frame and yellow cut ends; the blue seat somehow gets forgotten as an image, but is recalled by the name.^ The chair is of such significance in modernism that it is now sold by Cassina for £4611.19 – see; https://www.cassina.com/en/collection/chairs/635-red-and-blue The world places a monetary value on what it highlights as 'important art,' with value increasing with popular reputation and status: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/11/do-museums-change-perceptions.html The house, occupied from 1925 to 1985 by the owner who commissioned it for herself and her three children, was left by Mrs. Truus Schrőder-Shrader* to the Rietveld Schrőder House Foundation and the Centraal Museum. It has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site. It is open as an exhibit for visitors - a landmark in Modernism that remains an inspiration for all.
So it was a surprise when searched on Google Earth and panned in Street View, to discover that this house is located at the end of a set of row houses, as an addition to a much larger project, with passersby strolling along as if the house meant nothing. The context was as if an experimental house in 1924 might only be given some leftover, unwanted site, out of the way of everything else, undesirably overlooking a freeway: for this is what it looked like.
Directly adjacent to the house is a four-lane freeway, and a pedestrian underpass. The context was a complete surprise. Why has none of this ever been revealed in the publications? One had no idea that this noisy clutter near a large housing development might have been the context for this modern wonder. Could this be another case of selective photography, the ambitions of the scenic eye?
When looking back at the images of the house that have been published over the years, it is noticed that most glimpses of the contiguous housing and neighbouring developments have been carefully framed out, with the famous southeastern elevation being shrewdly photographed with the appropriate lens and at the precise location so as to show the building cutting airily into the rich, blue sky, as if it might be standing alone. The ordinary eye will usually see the high, dark gable end of the strip of residential apartments that the house abuts, looming above; and one will also be aware of the proximity of the motorway too - both its visual presence and polluting noise; but the camera cleverly excludes these neighbours.
Photographs of the other two elevations of the house that could easily be snapped to reveal the complete context, have also been selectively framed with a conscious effort to suggest that the Rietveld building is standing in a beautifully idyllic, open grassy field with some picturesque trees clustered about. Modernism, it seems, dislikes proximities: see – https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-rose-seidler-house-private-visions.html; (and post-modernism too - see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-vanna-venturi-house-postmodern.html); and appears to pass quick, brutal judgement on 'lesser' neighbours that might have the temerity to intrude into the field of vision of the self-centred new, expressive identity that is expounding the ideals of a better world; a new future.
This selective approach to publication makes for a beautiful illusion that one soon realises to be a true charade, especially when the freeway is discovered. When one looks closer at the published photographs, images of the freeway only appear occasionally in interior shots, as views out of the windows - (c.f. Venturi mother's house); but one has to know it is there in order to recognise the out-of-focus blur once the admiring gaze has been redirected away from the allure of the attractive, clever detail. The general message is that one has to pretend that the freeway is not there, just as one is prompted to deny the identity of the huge, neighbouring housing development.
How on earth could this guile be perpetrated, let alone maintained? How has the secret been kept for so long? One's feelings for this house are immediately changed. How could Rietveld do this? Why design such a delightful complex adjacent to a freeway? It is truly an outrageous deception.
A reading of the history of the house makes things clear: the four-lane motorway and viaduct were constructed across the front lawn of the property in the 1960s. It is an unbelievable intrusion to have been allowed to happen, but the 1960's is known for its brash insensitivities made in the name of progress. One recalls the demolition of the astonishing Penn Station and many other great buildings, all, ironically, in the name of Modernism and its idealism rooted in 'progress' and 'improvement,' just to get the terrible mess we have today.
Originally the house, located at the end of a strip of row housing that snakes away into the distance when seen from the air, had looked out over a vast polder landscape, low-level land enclosed by dikes, a vista that played a pivotal part in the design. This view was so important that, when the land, that was, in the 1930's, on the outer edge of Utrecht, came up for development, Truus Schrőder purchased it to maintain her outlook. Thirty years later, the motorway was built.
Rietveld's association with this house was always very close.# Truus Schrőder gave Rietveld a room on the ground floor that he used as his studio. With the death of his wife in 1957, Rietveld moved in with Truus Schrőder, living there until his death in 1964.
The sad situation is that Rietveld must have been in the house when the motorway resumption occurred, and possibly when the construction work was underway, during the last years of his life. His disappointment is recorded in his comment that the house might just as well be demolished since what linked the interior and the exterior had been destroyed. One can agree with this, while being pleased that the house did not get knocked down, knowing that it has become a museum piece, removed from its responsible role of happy habitation to become an exhibit, a shell voided of its former, life-enhancing vitality. The last twenty years of Truus Schrőder’s life in the house must have been a terrible disappointment, what with Rietveld's death and the construction of the invasive neighbouring motorway.
One can understand why the freeway is never photographed when the exclusion is seen as an attempt to recreate Rietveld's original vision. The careful framing also seems to recognise some public embarrassment with the rude intrusion of this noisy, polluting structure into the ambience of this masterpiece: but what is just as difficult to forgive is the original presentation of the house that carefully isolates it from its neighbouring housing, and even from its adjacent car parking area. From the very beginning, the building has been presented as a gem, mounted alone for its own glory, isolated from its 'more challenging' adjacent buildings and spaces that deny Modernism its unique grandeur. As with most published modern buildings, the Schrőder house has been illustrated out if its context: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2019/03/architectures-two-remote-islands-too.html
Street View is able to address both situations, remedy them: it reveals the full, everyday context, with neighbouring buildings, spaces, vegetations, pathways, and roads, all there for everyone to see in their rude reality, complete with the motorway that needs to be illustrated in order to highlight the gross insensitivities and stupidity of man - humankind's ignorance and arrogance that promotes 'progress' that will stop at nothing while going nowhere in particular, just the cliche 'forward.'
The Schrőder house remains, more than ever, an exercise in 'seeing as,' with the challenge being for all to see the building as it has been illustrated, both prior to and after the terrible 1960's. Remembering that the house is close to 100 years old, leaves one gobsmacked. It is truly an amazing place that sustains its authority in spite of the shrewd presentations that all try to define the special ways of seeing; but one has to ask: have we created our own special image of Modernism by our carefully framed photographs? Do we know the Rietveld house only as an idealised phantom that we seek to overlay on our seeing, nonchalantly, naively, without any concern or criticism? Is Modernism a failure because of this circumstance? Is this isolation the origin of our idea of architecture only as 'grand design,' with each individual architect being considered a creative genius?
Do Modernism's problems arise from its desire to cut itself off from the ordinary, everyday world? Is this the beginning of the elitism that causes so many problems today, with 'architecture' occupying its own bespoke world of indulgent 'LOOK AT ME' creativity?
^
This situation is similar to the way the eye remembers, well, forgets, the colours inside the light canons at Le Corbusier's La Tourette monastery: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2012/05/la-tourette.html The response to the question when asked is usually red, blue, and yellow, when the colours are a surprising red, white, and black. The surrounding ceiling and wall surfaces are blue and yellow.
*
#
See: rietveldschroderhuis.nl for an overview of the history and images of this remarkable building that is really a cooperative piece that should include the name Truus Schrőder, not only as the owner, but also as the designer. Her role in the outcome is as important as Rietveld's.
She and Rietveld did another housing project together. Rietveld was always close to Truus Schrőder, working in a lower room of the house, and moving in with her after his wife died.
NOTE
Rietveld's relationship with this house reminds one of other architects who build for a client, and become so attached to the place that it is purchased by the architect for personal use, as if to indulge in the success, to keep the dream alive. Glen Murcutt comes to mind here. He purchased his Marie Short house outside Kemsey. It is the house that began his 'timber and tin' - "touch the ground lightly" - success. His earlier work was just as rigorous, but had a stronger Meisian identity to it. The 'timber and tin' style keeps the Meisian attention to detail and style, with, it has been argued, a regional/Australian overlay. It uses traditional bush materials, but lacks the ad hoc, inventive, casual cleverness of the bushie's trade, the almost careless problem-solving, being self-consciously planned and detailed down to the last millimetre: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2013/11/bond-downpipes.html In spite of the history of the mosque in Australia that similarly used the 'bush' materials, Murcutt went away from this style to revert to a different Corbusian/Miesian expression with his mosque outside Melbourne: see - https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/01/murcutts-mosque-meanings-sources.html One wonders why.
A SELECTION OF PHOTPGRAPHS
FROM GOOGLE IMAGES
In spite of the variety of photographs, the freeway is never revealed. It is as if the world recognises the embarrassment; or is it to maintain the dream? Either way, we perpetuate a false vision as an inspiration for a future that has already failed. There is an irony in that fact that this house has been listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site, when it needs to be held up as an example of man’s rudeness and insensitivity to place and ideas; the mayhem of planning.
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