Rietveld Schroder House

Truus Schroder-Schrader, recently widowed, asked Gerrit Rietveld in 1924 to build her a house in which she could live with her three children without conventional rooms, and the result is the only building that carries the De Stijl principles all the way through: a composition of intersecting planes and lines in white, grey, red, blue and yellow, with no load-bearing internal walls upstairs. The upper floor is one space that can be divided by sliding and folding partitions and opened again in minutes, so the plan changes through the day - which is the thing photographs cannot convey and the tour demonstrates. Corner windows open so the corner post disappears. Rietveld himself lived here later. It stands at the end of a terrace of ordinary brick houses, built right against a road that was later widened into a viaduct, and it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000.

History

Gerrit Rietveld built the house in 1924 for Truus Schröder-Schräder and her three children, working side by side with her after she rejected his first sketch; she wanted a house preferably without walls, and both shared progressive ideals that set out to dismantle bourgeois notions of hierarchy and containment through the design. Rietveld first wanted to build in concrete, but on so small a building it proved too expensive, so only the foundations and balconies are concrete, with walls of brick and plaster, wooden floors, frames and doors, and steel girders with wire mesh for support. Schröder lived in the house until her death in 1985, it has been a listed monument since 1976, it was restored by Bertus Mulder and is now a museum run by the Centraal Museum, and on 2 December 2000 it became a World Heritage Site (Wikipedia, Rietveld Schröder House).

What's there

• A floor with no fixed rooms - partitions sliding and folding to change the plan.
• Corner windows that open out - dissolving the corner post when swung wide.
• De Stijl carried through - planes and primary colours applied to a whole building.
• An ordinary terrace beside it - the house built at the end of a row of brick houses.

When to go

All year. Two hours.

Practical notes

Entry is by guided tour only, in very small groups, booked well ahead - it sells out weeks in advance and there is no walk-up. No photography inside. A motorway viaduct now runs beside it.

Nearby

Utrecht's old town and Dom tower are west; the Centraal Museum holds Rietveld's furniture.

Key facts