Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [23]
Reason
The first is reasoned argument. A design cannot develop solely by way of reasoning – there is always at some point a creative leap in the process, except perhaps in a very traditional society when we might decide that now is the moment to have a house like every other house we know. Even then, the appeal isn’t really to reasoning as to the repetition of experience. Reasoning, in the strict sense of moving from agreed premises to necessary conclusions, is never the only way of thinking involved in finding a design, but it is necessary if one is to assess the merits of a given design. It should be possible to frame an argument that shows why a design is good, and this will amount to a demonstration that the design will do what it is supposed to do. In buildings where technical matters predominate, this might well be the main form of persuasion used in winning approval for the design. However buildings are often complex, and have many factors working on them that interfere with one another. For example if I make some windows larger in order to let in more light or open up a view, then the building might let out more heat, and it could be necessary to install a more powerful heater. This actually happened at the house that Gerrit Rietveld designed for Mrs Schröder in Utrecht (Figure 9). The central heating system here was normally used for heating industrial space. It cost as much as a typical Utrecht house of the day, and made the cost of the whole house about twice that of an ordinary house of its size. The decision to install the heater must have been the result of reasoning, because it has no other obvious appeal. Given the novel form of the house, its unusual degree of openness to the outside, and the consequent loss of heat, the decision to install the heater was undoubtedly rational. However it is equally clear that the overall form of the building was not devised by way of reason alone – otherwise one might have decided on smaller windows and have had a house that was less costly both to build and to run.
9. Schröder house, Utrecht, Netherlands (1924); architect: Gerrit Rietveld (1888–1964). This small house was on the edge of Utrecht when it was built, on the end of a terrace of more conventional houses, looking out across the absolutely flat surrounding countryside. It was built for Mrs Schröder, a widow with children, who commissioned Rietveld, a furniture designer, to make a design that suited her ideas about how to live. On the upper floor an arrangement of folding and sliding screen walls made it possible to have a large open space, or to screen areas off to give individuals visual privacy – the screens did not allow much acoustic privacy. Rietveld was involved with the De Stijl group of artists, and the design of the house connects with their ideas about form, rather than with any traditional ideas about architecture or building. The appearance of the house was always extraordinary and novel, but its means of construction were fairly traditional, the walls being built of brickwork, rendered and painted.
Conviction
The house has had tremendous influence in the decades since it was built, and among architects it is one of the best remembered buildings of the 1920s, despite its small size and inconspicuous location – outside the town centre of a provincial town in a small country. If it had been known that it would keep the Schröder name imperishably in the public eye, then that might have been a reason for building a house in this way, but of course the house’s reputation could not be predicted in advance, and this form of argument could not have been rationally allowed at the time that Mrs Schröder took the decision to build. What is more likely to have persuaded her of the rightness of the design was the force of Rietveld’s personal conviction. The client had strong convictions of her own, about the way that life should be lived. Every bedroom could work as a small living room, and all the rooms could be thrown together into one big space by folding away the walls, which were just thin