Movement and Myth: The Schröder House and Transformable Living

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Catherine Croft

technological 2000

early 20th century

One of the promises of the Modern Movement in architecture was its ability to realise that once the plan was free and open, space could be demarked, reformed and reconfigured with the aid of kinetic architectural elements or mobile furniture units. Catherine Croft's text looks inside the social pragmatics of spatial transformability to see how, as a generator of form, it provokes the limit of what is acceptable and tolerable with regards to privacy, even within the social atmosphere between family members. Contextualised through the Rietveld-Schröder House, this issue is discussed through the realities of family life and how, over time, they change and force spatial issues of segregation and enclosure. While this house is discussed as the transformable object, the text reveals larger underlying transformations to do with living patterns, generational differences, cultural values and the re-edification of conventional spatial patterns critical to contemporary interior design.

Central to any analysis of the Schröder House is the nature of public/private space. Surveying the house in plan, the overall layout of the first floor is clear whether the partitions are open or closed. However, for the user, the realms created by the partitions must have been clearly delineated as private. This use of space is closer to the Arts and Crafts creation of spaces within spaces: the fireside alcove, the projecting oriel at Philip Webb's Red House (1859) encouraging separate activities within a companionable larger volume (although perhaps relegating female activity to marginal zones).

Ironically, however, by rejecting any clearly defined hierarchical space, the Schröder House becomes not more egalitarian but more dictatorial. For example, any conventional notions of privacy would have been dispensed with – one would actually have to make a bathroom by pulling out walls around the bath, the antithesis of a relaxing experience. The Schröder House's mythology might place an emphasis on a pioneering form of modern free living, but the reality is about control, not freedom. It could even be said to resemble life in prison, with its proscribed actions at proscribed times. The partitions, which are drawn at night to separate off the four corners of the space, providing separate sleeping areas for the children, do not make sense unless all are closed or all open. There is thus no scope for

The Schröder House: interior c. 1987, after restoration. Photo courtesy of Hubert-Jan Henket, © Collectie Centraal Museum, Utrecht.

different time schedules – in contemporary terms, for a stroppy teenager to stay in bed until noon, or to leave filthy underwear strewn across the floor. This physical compression of family life must have placed strains on even the most unconventional set-up. Ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy. (… p 12)

Schröder's contemporaries were more impressed by the bold use of colour, sadly lost to us in the black and white photographs that record the house's original form. The elements of De Stijl – the unconventional elevations at the end of a conventional Utrecht street – were more controversial than the interior arrangements. However, from the beginning, reservations were raised about practicality. In 1925, J.G. Wattjes wrote:

By rejecting the normal method of subdividing space – with fixed walls – and choosing a system of sliding partitions, an extremely flexible arrangement of the interior is achieved … the intentions behind this 'machine for living in' is not that now and again you can change the arrangement of the interior, it is that each day you can alter it several times, as often as changing needs require. The question is, will such extreme flexibility in fact prove convenient in the long run? I very much doubt it.¹

The house represents a form of intellectual alienation, from both conventional society and from conventional family arrangements.

More than any of the other buildings that make up the established modernist canon – the Villa Savoye, the Barcelona Pavilion, et al – the Schröder House combines a sense of pioneering architectural invention with close allegiance to a contemporary art movement; it is both a 'machine for living in' and an aesthetically composed work of the Dutch De Stijl movement. For many years, it was this relationship that formed the basis of critical appraisal, but the extent to which Rietveld himself saw the sliding screens and partitioning as ground breaking – something likely to have a lasting influence rather than being a highly idiosyncratic response to an individual client – is questionable. (… p 14)

Note

1 JG Wattjes, 'Stories from Behind the Scenes of Dutch Moral Modernism', Crimson (with Michael Speaks and Gerard Hadders), Mart Stam's Trousers, 010 Publishers (Rotterdam), 1999.

Catherine Croft, 'Movement and Myth: The Schröder House and Transformable Living', Architectural Design, vol 70 no 4, 2000, pp 10–15.