Women and the Making of the Modern House: The Schroder House

Posted on February 24, 2014 by tina

The second innovative house project, involving female clients and well-known architects, is the Schroder House, in Utrecht, Netherlands. The house was designed by Gerrit Rietveld for Truus Schroder in 1923-1924.

This house is of particular interest to me because as an architecture student I made the pilgrimage to The Netherlands specifically to see it. I was studying in London when I made the trip to see this fine example of the De Stijl (aka Neoplasticisim) movement and icon of modern architecture.

It took a while to find it and when we did it was smaller than I had imagined but so beautiful. There it stood in all its acontextual beauty like an exotic alien species against the backdrop of austere traditional dutch architecture.

The Schroder House house looks like a 3 dimensional Piet Mondrion, De Stijl painting. The two are often compared to one another and arise from the same geometric theoretical principles of pure abstraction of horizontal and vertical forms expressed using only primary colours to achieve a kind of universality of form and expression. Ironically the Schroder, while in stark contrast to its historic neighbours, still expresses the Calvinist severity and clarity of the Dutch mind.

Truus Schroder was a young widow with 3 children when her family moved into the house. She had a vision of family life in the modern world. Friedman describes this saying â€œthe house had a double personality-playful and carefree on the one hand, yet disciplined and even moralistic on the other-reflects the complex personalities of architect and client, and the unique nature of the collaboration between Rietveld, who had never built a building before, and Schroder, a well-to-do women with strong ideas about how and where she wanted to live.â€

The house was an opportunity to break free of â€˜repressive traditions and rules-both social and architectural, and create a totally modern environment. The use of bright coloured elements represented freedom and choice.

Truus Schroder and Gerrit Rietveld went on to work together on a number of important projects together during the 1920s and 1930s. â€œThe work Rietveld and Schroder did together was not simply to communicate this new sense of life but literally to guide body and mind toward clearer and more actions and thoughtsâ€

The Red and Blue Chair was designed in 1917 by Gerrit Rietveld. It represents one of the first explorations by the De Stijl art movement in three dimensions.

All Photos are from Google Images. All quotes are from Women and the Making of the Modern House by Alice T. Friedman

Women and the Making of the Modern House Part 2

Posted on January 27, 2014 by tina

Hollyhock House

American heiress, Aline Barnsdall commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design Hollyhock House because she wanted to build a theatre for her newly formed theatrical company. Her goal was to use her experience and vast wealth to establish a centre for art theatre in American to rival those found in Europe. She wanted a place where her architect, Frank Lloyd Wright â€œcould build a theatre, a community, and a home that would match her dreams with a boldness and individuality of their own.â€Â Aline Barnsdall hoped her experimental project for an American theatre community would grow and prosper in California.

This collaboration between Frank Lloyd Wright and Aline Barnsdall during the period of 1915 and 1923 was unusual because it called for a rethinking of building types and challenged the â€œnotions of house design, family life, and domesticity.â€Â Hollyhock House was not designed for the private life of a family but rather as a centrepeice in a public garden, and a theatre complex.Â This freed up architect and client to push the boundaries of architecture including the experiences of monumental form, theatricality, and how the house framed the landscape.

The hollyhock is used as a central theme to the house, with many symmetrical decorations adapting the plant’s general appearance. Planters are decorated with the motif and filled with the plants themselves, and Wright’s stained glass windows feature a highly-stylized hollyhock pattern.

Alice T. Friedman contends that Hollyhock has a lot to teach us about “creativity and about the sorts of new experiences that become possible when conventions of social behaviour, program, and planning are challenged.”

Disillusioned by the costs of construction and maintenance, Barnsdall donated the house to the city of Los Angeles in 1927 under the stipulation that a fifteen-year lease be given to the California Art Club for its headquarters, which it maintained until 1942.Hollyhock has been used by various organizations and has had restoration work done over the years.Â The U.S. Department of the Interior designated Hollyhock House a National Historic Landmark in 2007 (Wikipedia)

All photos are from Alice T. Friedmanâ€™s book, or as noted by Rick McNees.

Women and the Making of the Modern House Part 1

Posted on January 19, 2014 by tina

Why were independent female clients such powerful catalysts for innovation in the modern house?

Women and the Making of the Modern House, written by AliceÂ T. Friedman, is a thought-provoking book that answers this question by exploring two seemingly unrelated topics: gender roles, and architecture.

Specifically, the book focuses on 6 innovative projects, involving female clients and well-known architects. These projects are the best-known examples of unprecedented architecture that had female clientele at the forefront of each project’s innovation. It combines social and architectural history to investigate the roles played by both the architects and the clients, and explores the processes of collaboration and negotiation through which decisions about program and design were made.

A conviction shared by modern architects and their women clients was that the essence of modernity was the complete alteration of the home â€“ its construction, materials, and interior space.

â€œNot only did women commission avant-garde architects to provide them with houses in which to live out their visions of a new life, but these visions rested on a redefinition of domesticity that was fundamentally spatial and physical. A powerful fusion of feminism with the forces of change in architecture thus propelled these projects into uncharted realms of originalityâ€

The 6 innovative houses are:

Hollyhock House, Los Angeles, 1919-21, by Frank Lloyd Wright for Alice Barnsdall

House 2: The Schroder House, Utrecht, the Netherlands, 1923-24, by Gerrit Rietveld for Truus Schroder

House 3:Â Villa Stein-de-Monzie, by Le Corbusier, was constructed from 1926-1928 and it is located in Garches, France.