In Praise of The Open House
In Praise of the Open House – 100 years of the Rietveld-Schroder House, Utrecht
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The following was commissioned by RTÉ Sunday Miscellany on the occassion of Open House Dublin 2024. It featured on a special edition of the radio show. You can listen to this piece being read here.
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Someone once told me that Dublin is a city of houses and that most of what matters to people is happening behind closed doors. I often think of these words as I walk through the city to work, passing row after row, street after street of red brick houses and homes. Houses, the most private of things, in fact tell the most publicly valuable tales. We are what we build, and houses hold history hidden like no other buildings I know.
This year one of the most famous houses ever designed and built, the Rietveld-Schröder House is 100 years old. Located at the end of the long leafy terraces of Prins Henriklaan in the Dutch city of Utrecht, I recently visited the house again for my first time in thirty years.
In terms of floor area, the house is modest – the size of a typical Irish semi-d – but it is a world heritage site due to its importance not only to architecture and culture but, as UNESCO confirmed, to humanity itself.
The Rietveld-Schröder house was a collaboration between Gerrit Rietveld and Truss Schröder. As one of the only built examples of the radical ideas of the De Stijl group of artists, architects, and designers, active in the Netherlands between 1917 and ‘31, and to which Rietveld belonged, the house became a kind of mascot for that movement and thus both notorious and influential.
De Stijl was founded by painters Theo Van Doesburg and Piet Mondriaan, as a reaction to the horrors of World War I and with the firm belief that they could transform a world destroyed by war into a new utopia with architecture harnessing the unity of all the arts, engineering, and industry towards some social and spiritual redemption.
As I approached this house last August, so familiar to me as an architect, I was surprised, even taken aback. With its crisp, grey, and white floating wall panels, accents of black steel and saturated primary colours of blue, red, and yellow, with three front doors, and with corner windows that hinged outwards with no structural supports, this house appeared out of this world. Indeed, the two-storey house with a very flat roof, could not have been more different than the sober three-storey, pitched roof, brick terraced houses on the gables of which it had been squarely built.
I imagine, when the scaffold came down one hundred years ago, the house must truly have looked like it landed from outer space.
Back in 1924 when the house was completed many in Utrecht saw it as an affront to tradition, pelting it with tomatoes. The house was so unusual that Truss Schroder’s daughter dared not tell her schools friends it was her family home. You can imagine her embarrassment when “that weird house” as it was nick-named, became the subject of school yard gossip and teasing.
Schroder’s desire for this “weird” new house was propelled by grief. Widowed in 1923, she once wrote that faced with 3 children to care for alone, she needed to think deeply about how next they should live.
With her life changed forever, she wanted an open house in which she and her children could mourn in the light. She rejected her bourgeois life and the stuffy, dark architecture it required, even asking her children to leave their belongings behind as their new home came into view.
Schröder had met Rietveld briefly in 1911 when he delivered a desk to her husband, and, liking his style, in 1921 he was asked to alter one room in her family home, a room that she later recalled as my “beautiful room of greys”.
Led by Schröder, the pair set about imagining another kind of domestic arrangement altogether, carried out on the first floor, not on the ground, with living and sleeping in one large space that could flexibly fold into five.
Fixed on new horizons, Schroder wanted the air, the light, and view of the polder landscape, to be always present indoors. It was she who determined that a boundary between inside and out might dissolve via massive, hinged windows. And she who wanted her children close by as they played, as she worked, as they grew old and up together.
When an enthusiastic Rietveld presented the first, quite typical sketch for a house full of rooms to her it was firmly rejected. “Can’t we get rid of the walls” she asked to which Rietveld replied, “with pleasure, away with the walls!”
Such ideas may seem commonplace now, but they were extraordinary then. Next time ideas of open plan living with children on view and easy movement between inside and out are debated on a Sunday night makeover tv show – perhaps remember Truss Schröder.
She lived in the house from 1924 until her death in 1985. When Rietveld’s wife died, he moved into the house until his death in 1964. Neither had trained as an architect, but the pair worked downstairs, designing together, among other things, two social housing blocks nearby.
When I was a student, I was in awe of the design brilliance of this house. I still am, but 30 years on, with age and experience of love, grief and making a home with another, having a house is a precious freedom.
On a sunny Saturday tour, I spot a small portrait of Rietveld taped to a blue wall, while to an audience of visitors, a smiling, white-gloved guide is now performing the act of first closing then opening the flexible, folding partitions and doors in the collapsible, colourful upstairs room for which the house is world-renowned.
As the light is pushed out and drawn in again, it’s as if the house itself is a pulsing, breathing, living thing.
The room rumbles as partitions roll, and I can almost hear them laugh, giddy together in love and in thrall of the open house, away with the walls, away with the walls.
