The Prins Hendriklaan would be like several other streets in Utrecht. If there were not this corner house, which stands out colossally from the unitary brick of the Dutch row houses: rectangular, nested plates and colorful struts in front of the large windows. A kind of three-dimensional Mondrian, thrown into the heart of the Dutch city.

The association is no coincidence: what Piet Mondrian's fine art work is is Gerrit Rietveld's designs for design and architecture. His Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht is a figurehead of the De Stijl group of artists, whose founding is celebrated a hundred years ago in the Netherlands.

In 1917, the Dutch author, artist and architect Theo van Doesburg formulated the first edition of his journal "De Stijl", which would later be picked up by a loose group of like-minded people: an art that needed no narration and interpretation, because it is comprehensible to all , A kind of Gesamtkunstwerk including design and architecture, which was finally so perfectly true and right that it should change the lives of people for the better for the better.

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World Improver: The Architecture of De Stijl

Van Doesburg's ideal of art emerged in a time of great disappointments and shocks - the First World War was not over yet - but also in a time of great ideas. The idea that art and design could save the world seemed plausible to the avant-garde. She believed in the power of geometry. Aesthetics and design were not an end in themselves, everything made sense in practice. It was the same philosophy that guided the Bauhaus in Germany.

In the Rietveld Schröder House, the experimental is not limited to the external language of form. The oddities go on inside: There is a red button, which reveals a secret staircase after operation, which otherwise saves space behind a wall. An analogous variant of the imaginative living environment in which everything works mechanically: walls can be moved so that the living space can be adapted dynamically at any time.

Built in 1924, the house is a kind of anti-cube that breaks through the closed lines of earlier buildings. The border between interior and exterior skin is dissolved by large windows and components that do not cover the interior of the house as usual in closed onion layers, but continuously lead from outside to inside. Typical for De Stijl are the primary colors: blue, yellow and red, black and white give structure to the potentially changeable spaces.

Rietveld celebrates corners and edges

Rietveld completed his radical draft with the resident. Truus Schröder-Schräder, socialite and friend of the avant-garde artists, was instrumental in the development with her very specific ideas. Of course, she was not interested in inhabiting an adult architectural playground, a kinetic adventure designer house: all the gimmicks serve a purpose and purpose - just as every single line, every rectangle should. As Rietveld himself explained: "It has always been my main goal to give meaning to a still unformed space."

The house is full of Rietveld design, famous pieces of furniture like the red and blue armchair or the stacking cabinet. As simple as the raw materials and forms are, their interaction is so spectacular: nothing fits quietly and modestly into the room, instead Rietveld celebrates corners and edges. There is no pure decor. Each strut on the chair remains visible. Nothing is hidden, everything confidently carried outside and emphasized by colored areas.

Compared to the chair classics of midcentury design icons, for example, the Rietveld chair still seems bulky, it would not easily translate into a more common mass language. Quite a few De Stijl designs are reluctant to transform into a pure design object. It is reasonably difficult to imagine a massively modified copy of the armchair or stacking cabinet in the furniture catalog, where today is unabashedly copied from design classics. So remains for friends of Rietveld's design until today only the handle to re-edition - for 2515 euros the piece.

Rietveld has never fully associated with De Stijl. Its construction in Utrecht is still their best-known architectural figurehead - and has long been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The one, dedicated De Stijl house does not exist anyway. Which school of ideas has ever been fully realized in reality? "Art is not a being but a becoming" is one of the best-known quotes van Doesburg.

For those interested:

  • "Going Soft" at the TextielMuseum, Tilburg, until 6 May 2017
  • Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, 21-29 October 2017
  • Mondriaan & De Stijl, permanent exhibition, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag
  • Rietveld Schröder Huis, Utrecht, visit by appointment possible.