Movement and Myth: The Schröder House and Transformable Living

Author: Catherine Croft Year: 2006 (reprint; original publication 2000) Source type: chapter — Intimus anthology selection. Originally published as Catherine Croft, "Movement and Myth: The Schröder House and Transformable Living," Architectural Design, vol. 70, no. 4, 2000, pp. 10–15; the Intimus reprint is excerpts of pp. 11–14 (Intimus pp. 75–78, including a full-page interior photograph, p. 76), © 2000 John Wiley and Sons Ltd, reprinted by permission. (The raw file's header line spells the anthology "Intumus" and the co-editor "Juleanna" — the correct names are Intimus and Julieanna Preston; body text untouched.) Raw file: raw/chapters/croft_2006-movement-myth-schroder-house.md

Summary

Catherine Croft's essay (introduced in Intimus by editors Mark Taylor and Julieanna Preston) reads the Rietveld-Schröder House (Utrecht, 1924) against its own mythology. The Modern Movement promised 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"; Croft looks "inside the social pragmatics of spatial transformability" and finds that, 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." The house's sliding partitions, celebrated as pioneering free living, are revealed as apparatuses of control: rooms must be made (even the bathroom), schedules must be shared, and the family's life is physically compressed. "Ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy." Croft also situates the house critically: closer to the Arts and Crafts' spaces-within-spaces than to open-plan egalitarianism; "both a 'machine for living in' and an aesthetically composed work of the Dutch De Stijl movement"; a likely idiosyncratic response to an individual client rather than a replicable breakthrough; and a house of "intellectual alienation, from both conventional society and from conventional family arrangements."

Key Claims

The Modern Movement promised 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" (editors' introduction, p. 75) — transformability as the free plan's built consequence.
Transformability, "as a generator of form, provokes the limit of what is acceptable and tolerable with regards to privacy, even within the social atmosphere between family members" (editors' introduction, p. 75); the family's changing realities "over time… force spatial issues of segregation and enclosure" (editors' introduction, p. 75).
"Central to any analysis of the Schröder House is the nature of public/private space" (p. 75): the first-floor plan is legible "whether the partitions are open or closed," but "for the user, the realms created by the partitions must have been clearly delineated as private" (p. 75).
The house's spatial practice 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)" (p. 75) — than to modernist openness.
"Ironically, however, by rejecting any clearly defined hierarchical space, the Schröder House becomes not more egalitarian but more dictatorial" (p. 75).
Conventional privacy is dispensed with: "one would actually have to make a bathroom by pulling out walls around the bath, the antithesis of a relaxing experience" (p. 75) — the user must perform architecture to achieve the most private act.
"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" (p. 75).
The night partitions separating "the four corners of the space… for the children, do not make sense unless all are closed or all open" (p. 75) — so "there is thus no scope for 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" (p. 77).
"This physical compression of family life must have placed strains on even the most unconventional set-up. Ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy" (p. 77) — the client for whom flexibility was designed ended up wanting the opposite.
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 De Stijl elevations "at the end of a conventional Utrecht street – were more controversial than the interior arrangements," and "from the beginning, reservations were raised about practicality" (p. 77).
J.G. Wattjes (1925) already doubted the program: sliding partitions achieve "an extremely flexible 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" (p. 77).
"The house represents a form of intellectual alienation, from both conventional society and from conventional family arrangements" (p. 77).
"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" (p. 77) — and it was this art-movement relationship, not the interior arrangements, "that formed the basis of critical appraisal" (p. 77).
"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. 77).
The editors' framing: while the 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" (editors' introduction, p. 75).

Connections

Concepts: flexible-interior — the concept's canonical built instance and its first sustained social critique; schroder-house — the house itself; privacy — the essay's central analytic category (public/private space); machine-for-living — the modernist doctrine the house literalizes; domestic-interior — the family's compressed life within the transformable plan; counter-construction — the De Stijl aesthetic allegiance; modernism — the Modern Movement's promise and its mythology; partition-of-space — partitions as social ordering realized hourly by occupants; enclosure — the prison comparison, "proscribed actions at proscribed times"; gender-and-the-interior — female activity "relegat[ed]… to marginal zones," and the female client who commissioned the house.

Authors: croft-catherine — the essay's author, architectural historian and (since 2002) Director of the Twentieth Century Society; Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the Intimus editors whose introduction frames the essay; Le Corbusier — the "machine for living in" doctrine and the modernist canon (Villa Savoye) against which the house is measured.

Debates: static-vs-dynamic-architecture — the essay supplies the debate's social deflation position: dynamism as control, plus Wattjes's 1925 practicality skepticism as the historical antecedent of Glanville's cybernetic deflation.

Related source notes: A Christian House (Beecher & Stowe 1869/2006) — the movable screen as the flexible interior's nineteenth-century ancestor, designed (like the Schröder partitions) around a family's assumed rhythms; Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the electronic descendant of the dynamic interior Croft critiques; A history of style and the modern interior (Deyong 2018) — the De Stijl/counter-construction lineage Croft invokes; Territory and inhabitation (Campos 2018) — the contemporary nomadic version of transformable space; Bodies and Mirrors (Colley 1999/2006) — the Intimus predecessor chapter on inhabiting the domestic interior.

Direct Quotes

"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." (editors' introduction, p. 75)

"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." (editors' introduction, p. 75)

"Central to any analysis of the Schröder House is the nature of public/private space." (p. 75)

"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)." (p. 75)

"Ironically, however, by rejecting any clearly defined hierarchical space, the Schröder House becomes not more egalitarian but more dictatorial." (p. 75)

"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." (p. 75)

"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." (p. 75)

"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 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." (pp. 75–77)

"This physical compression of family life must have placed strains on even the most unconventional set-up. Ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy." (p. 77)

"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." (J.G. Wattjes, 1925, quoted p. 77)

"The house represents a form of intellectual alienation, from both conventional society and from conventional family arrangements." (p. 77)

"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." (p. 77)

"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. 77)

"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." (editors' introduction, p. 75)

Open Questions

If the partitions "do not make sense unless all are closed or all open," was the Schröder House's transformability ever genuinely habitational flexibility — or was it the De Stijl counter-composition realized twice a day (all-open day, all-closed night), flexibility as compositional rhythm rather than per-occupant choice? See flexible-interior, counter-construction.
Croft notes that Rietveld's own commitment to the screens "is questionable" — if transformability was the client's (Truus Schröder's) program rather than the architect's theory, what does that do to the canonical authorship story of modernism's most famous interior?
"Ultimately, Schröder craved greater privacy": is every flexible interior's occupant asked to perform the labor of architecture (making the bathroom, drawing the partitions) — and is that labor the hidden cost that the Beechers' "child can move the whole easily" standard already registered?
Does Wattjes's 1925 practicality skepticism ("I very much doubt it") stand to every subsequent dynamic-interior paradigm as Glanville's 2001 cybernetic deflation does to interactive architecture — a recurring counter-voice the debate keeps re-meeting in new clothes? See static-vs-dynamic-architecture.
Contemporaries "were more impressed by the bold use of colour, sadly lost to us in the black and white photographs": how much of modernism's interior history is an artifact of its black-and-white archive — and what does the lost chromatic Schröder House do to chromophobia's whiteness story?