Architecture - Andrew Ballantyne [24]
When the rooms were enclosed, each one had a door to the outside, and a wash basin in it. This was not just an ordinary house that the designer managed to make artistically adventurous – it was designed to accommodate a fresh way of living. Nevertheless, the reason that the house looked the way it did was because of Rietveld’s involvement with the De Stijl group of artists (which included the painter Mondrian in its number) and he came to the project with experience in furniture design, following the principles of using lines and planes at right angles to one another, and primary colours. These might seem like odd principles to have adopted, but he did adopt them. His reasons for doing so need not detain us here, but involved a belief that by these means one could directly influence the state of the soul. It is quite possible that Mrs Schröder shared these convictions too, in which case she would have been persuaded by reason. If however she did not accept Rietveld’s premises but was impressed by his seriousness of purpose and believed that he would achieve something worthwhile, then she would have been persuaded in a way that is used more often than it is acknowledged. In effect this is the same as convincing someone of one’s authority to deal with the matter in hand, and it takes the general form of saying ‘trust me, I am able to judge this better than you are’.
Seduction
The third form of persuasion is different again, because it does not claim authority, but rather charms the client into suspending criticism. This might be because the design is very appealing, or it might be because the architect is very appealing. It is not unknown for architects literally to seduce their clients, or their clients’ wives. Frank Lloyd Wright eloped with the wife of one of his clients, and consequently had to abandon not only his family, but also his successful architectural practice. He was not the only one. Indeed Rietveld grew very close to Mrs Schröder, and set up a studio in the built-in garage of her house, and displayed his furniture designs there. The charmer in effect says ‘indulge me, this is what I want, and you will love it because it is my work’. The power of both authority and charm come from either instructing or more gently persuading someone to stop reasoning, and accept advice. Individuals are more susceptible than are committees, and buildings commissioned by committees are correspondingly less idiosyncratic, more reasonable. A housing committee would never have commissioned the Schröder house. A committee formed to promote the ideals of De Stijl might have done.
A multiplicity of meanings
This little house neatly illustrates a variety of ways in which a building can have meaning. For the children who grew up in it, extraordinary though it may have been, it was home, and would have been a comforting and reassuring place to return to after a day at school. For the widow Schröder it was a basis for a fresh start and a new way of life after the death of her still young husband. For Rietveld it was an opportunity to put into practice on an unprecedented scale the ideas that he had been working on with his artist friends, and he did what it was necessary to do. For the neighbours the building must have seemed odd and unaccountable, and would have made no sense at all at first, but it gradually became familiar to them as a landmark at the edge of the town, looking out (as it did then) over flat open fields. In the 21st century the house looks ‘ahead of its time’, whatever that might mean, and if we were to think that we could guess at its date by looking at its style, then we would certainly guess some time after 1924, and might admire it for its apparent prescience. On the other hand we might look at its level of consumption of fuel and feel the need to condemn it on environmental grounds. There is one small building here, but many different ways to respond to it, so different sets of feelings are generated by it. Since architecture is what happens when we encounter a building and bring a culture