Rietveld meets Van Ravesteyn
Life can take strange turns for an architect. You can start as a furniture maker from Utrecht, coming from a background of small entrepreneurs, and become world-famous with a limited amount of architectural projects. After completing your education as a furniture maker, you attend evening courses at the "Kunstindustrieel Onderwijs der Vereeniging Het Utrechtse Museum van Kunstnijverheid" (Utrecht Museum Art Education Association) in Utrecht, and you work as a designer at the studio of silversmith C.J.A. Begeer on the Oudegracht for several years. In 1917, you open your own workshop. You encounter a new movement, and after Mondrian and Van Doesburg, you become the third partner of the group named De Stijl. You come across a special client, and the first house you design and realise for her in 1924 is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List in the year 2000. People know you for this famous house and the red-blue chair, which is even included in the Dutch canon.
Or perhaps you were born in Rotterdam as the son of a wine importer and a mother from a good background, raised with art and travel. You study civil engineering and specialise in steel structures at the Delft University of Technology, and through the Delft Student Corps and two other study associations, you become acquainted with architecture. You apply to the Maatschappij tot Exploitatie van Staatsspoorwegen NV (Dutch State Railway Company) as an aspiring assistant engineer, where you become a collaborator of George van Heukelom. He is the architect who becomes famous for his design of Hoofdgebouw III (Mainbuilding III) for the railway, commonly known as De Inktpot (The Inkpot). Throughout your career, your focus shifts from applied arts to architecture and the self-design of both buildings and interiors. You design and realise a large number of buildings and go down in history as the architect of the most demolished buildings in the Netherlands.
What few people know is that the first architect, Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964), and the second architect, Sybold van Ravesteyn (1889-1983), knew each other and lived within a stone's throw (265metres) of each other on Prins Hendriklaan in Utrecht.
Rietveld worked and lived in the Rietveld Schröder House from 1957 to 1964 after the death of his wife, while Van Ravesteyn lived in his own design from 1934 until his 92nd year in 1981. At first glance, the two houses seem unrelated. However, if you delve deeper into the lives of these two architects and their designs, you discover more parallels than one would initially expect. They were not friends, but as colleagues with a broad interest in art and architecture, they frequently encountered each other in Utrecht and corresponded with each other. They were closer to each other than the history books show.
Rietveld began designing the Rietveld Schröder House in 1924 when he was 34 years old. Truus Schröder-Schräder had asked Rietveld to design a room for herself in her house on Biltstraat in Utrecht. After the sudden death of her husband, Frits Schröder, she wanted to downsize with her three children. She had specific requirements for the new house. "She valued her privacy and disliked high spaces... She wanted to be as close as possible to her children. She also aimed for a form of coexistence where the children were raised as responsible and independent individuals." Both Rietveld and Schröder searched for suitable plots and both ended up choosing leftover pieces of land adjacent to a wall with no windows on . At that time, the view from the houses stretched over a vast polder landscape. Within seven months, the land was purchased, the design was made and the building permit was applied for and granted. At the end of the year, Truus Schröder-Schräder and the children moved into the house. It wasn't finished, but it was livable.
However, obtaining the building permit was not without difficulties. The design, with living spaces on the upper floor and sliding panels to create rooms, did not comply with the existing building regulations. A solution was found by representing a complete house on the ground floor in the drawings and considering the upper floor as an attic. As Rietveld later recalled during a tour at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, "Then we decided to make the house like that, but underneath we made a house that complied with the building regulations... that's underneath, and we made it a whole... It was very difficult to make sure the lower part didn't appear too massive compared to the upper part, as they would have been two things with different concepts. But we managed that quite well." This means that you experience different atmospheres, downstairs and upstairs. What is remarkable is that from the beginning, Rietveld designed a studio for himself on the ground floor of the Rietveld Schröder House. In 1933, he moved his office to Oudegracht, though the reason for this is unclear. Rietveld moved into the Rietveld Schröder House with Truus after his wife, Vrouwgien Hadders, passed away in 1957, and he died in his own self-designed house in 1964.
Sybold van Ravesteyn married Dora Hintzen, the daughter of a banker, in 1915. They had four children together. Van Ravesteyn had a good relationship with his children, taking them to movies and exhibitions and wanting to instil in them a sense of adventure and innovation. However, he was rarely at home and didn't go on vacations; he was devoted to his work. Eventually, Van Ravesteyn's marriage became one of convenience and ended in 1931 when the children's nanny, who took care of them, became pregnant with Van Ravesteyn's child. This also led to a rupture with his children, as the court prohibited him from seeing them for three years. He then married the nanny, Johanna van Geelkerken (Annie), a woman from a different social background. Her father was the director of a labor exchange, and her brother Kees was involved with Mussert in the establishment of a national socialist movement in the Netherlands. This marriage created a rift with colleagues and clients. In late 1931, their only child, Charles, was born. At that time, Van Ravesteyn was searching for a plot of land to build a house. In 1932, he managed to acquire an irregularly shaped piece of land at the end of . He submitted a building application in 1932 for a house with five bedrooms, so that all the children could live there. However, the building quotes for the design exceeded his budget. He modified the design and created a two-story plan for a small house with two bedrooms and a guest room. The house was occupied in 1933, and Van Ravesteyn lived there almost until his death.
What is interesting is that both men, despite their different backgrounds, transitioned into architecture later in life through furniture design. Rietveld became famous for his chairs, and as early as 1918, he posed with an initial version of his slatted chair on the sidewalk in front of his workshop at Adriaen van Ostadelaan 93 in Utrecht. His own workshop provided him with the opportunity to experiment and create things for himself that were even confusing for himself and which he didn't show to anyone, as he recalled in a 1958 interview with the magazine Vrij Nederland. Not everyone understood this direction, but he silenced critics by stating that they lacked an eye for the beauty of materials and construction. He was modest about his achievements but convinced of the path he had chosen, which was to innovate architecture. One of his frequently quoted statements aligns well with this: "the reality that architecture can create is space." With the Schröder commission, he had a tremendous opportunity to realise this vision.
His body of work is characterized by housing projects. One of his statements is, "the house is merely a backdrop for life." He built a considerable number of homes for individuals, although his main interest lay in industrialising the construction industry and solving the housing shortage with new types of homes. Designs for these homes (including the core house, standard house, and concept for a simple house) were featured in exhibitions and publications. He had the courage and audacity to work with new materials such as steel and concrete. Throughout his practice, he remained true to his principles: he worked from the interior and emphasised light and views. He had modest demands for himself and his family. From 1937 to 1958, he lived in an apartment he designed during the renovation of the Vreeburg cinema, in a leftover space above the theatre. It was a living space of 60m2 with three sleeping nooks and two separate bedrooms, one for the parents, all without doors but closed off by curtains.
From his youth, Van Ravesteyn was familiar with art and always had an interest in it. In 1919, he became a member of the Dutch Association for Crafts and Industrial Art (VANK) and attended art history classes at the People's University in Utrecht in 1920. He also joined the Utrecht Art Circle. His first furniture pieces were exhibited at an Applied Art exhibition in Dordrecht in late 1919 to early 1920. Through the exhibition council of VANK, he participated in group exhibitions in Paris, Leipzig, and Zurich. In 1920, he designed an oak chair with a leather seat and armrests that was manufactured in Rietveld's workshop. Designing furniture led him to make the transition from civil engineering to architecture, and at the age of 32, he began his career as an architect. However, he continued to design interiors and furniture, such as for his new house in Rotterdam in 1923.
His first and one of his most important private clients as an architect was Jonkheer (Esquire) Matthieu René Radermacher Schorer. He was the deputy director of the General Utrecht Fire Insurance Company and a patron of cultural initiatives, with a passion for literature, typography, and architecture. The furniture he designed for this client, black-and-white cabinets, showed similarities to Rietveld's designs from the same period. In 1925, he designed the first building for the State Railways, the Arnhemse Broek goods station (since demolished), which he also furnished. The building clearly displayed the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture. Critics praised the interior design as "no-nonsense furniture of unadorned simplicity" and referred to him as "the Dudok of interior architects." Well-known architects asked him to furnish their designed houses, such as architect Oud's row house in the Weissenhof Estate model housing estate in Stuttgart, a showcase of the new architectural style. This request was also made to Rietveld, but he declined, fearing that he would become too focused on furniture and interiors while his goal was to create architecture. In 1928, with Van Ravesteyn's design for the interior renovation of the Radermacher Schorer's residence in Wilheminapark, Utrecht, he introduced curved lines into his designs for the first time. Not everyone appreciated this transition, referring to it as neo-Baroque. Van Ravesteyn himself understood this, saying, "Because I wasn't entirely a hundred percent like the architects of De Stijl—using only the straight lines— and because I sought beauty and occasionally applied a curved line, the true New Objectivists like Stam and all those people actually considered me a fraud, an impure figure." His own motto was "modern architecture is not square, it lives."
Let's compare the two private residences side by side. Within Rietveld's body of work, the Rietveld Schröder House stands out as an exceptionally striking building. The façades of the house have transformed into a play of surfaces in white and gray, with horizontal and vertical lines in the accent colors of De Stijl: white, black, red, yellow, and blue. These surfaces are painted on the plasterwork of stone walls. The roof extends significantly beyond the windows of the upper floor, and there are balconies on three sides of the house. For that time, this was a groundbreaking new appearance for a residential house. The story goes that the municipality believed there would be a roof on top, but that was actually the roof of the adjacent building depicted in the drawing. One might think that the façade was created purely out of a desire for form, but Rietveld deliberately designed this from the inside out. He wanted to create smooth transitions between the interior and exterior, resulting in what is known as an "in-between space." A beautiful example can be seen in the window frames of the northeast corner, where the windows connect seamlessly without vertical mullions. When both windows are open, you feel as though you are standing outside rather than inside.
The ground floor is dedicated to household activities and work. The entrance leads you into the hallway with a child-height coat rack and a drawer for each resident. Here, you'll find Rietveld's studio, a study nook, the dining kitchen, a room for household help, a toilet, and the staircase. Notably, there is a speaking tube near the front door that connects to the upper floor. The red vertical accent by the speaking tube downstairs indicates, "Messages, please ring first. If no answer, use the speaking tube." The upper floor is the most eye-catching: it is one large space, with only the toilet and bathroom separated. Sliding walls can be used to partition off separate rooms within the living space, for example, to create sleeping areas. Colours on the floor delineate different domains without the need for physical barriers. Light enters from three sides, actually four sides, from three facades and also through the glass roof structure above the staircase. The staircase can also be enclosed using panels. Rietveld's background as a furniture maker is evident in the practical details, such as foldable tabletops under the windowsill for doing homework, a stack of cubes for storage, and beds with foldable ends to convert them into a sofa with a backrest. It must have been labour-intensive to use, but it was fully in line with the client's desires. According to the literature, the children did not always appreciate it.
Van Ravesteyn's house is less striking but still a distinctive presence among the traditional red-brick houses on Prins Hendriklaan. The silver-coloured garage door at the end of the path immediately catches the eye. The two-story mass in yellow bricks with a large round window on the upper floor (over a metre in diameter) also stands out immediately. The balcony on the upper floor, bordered by a steel pipe railing, now stands out mainly because of the large wisteria growing on it. The curved ground floor is less noticeable due to a large hedge at the street side. The garage turns out to be very narrow, and the path leading to it doesn't allow for opening the driver's door of a car on the path. The entrance door features cathedral glass with two sidelights, allowing plenty of light into the hallway. Both the garage and front door, as well as all the window frames, have an aluminum color, while all the frames are made of steel. It's interesting to note that, for cost reasons, the steel was produced in the construction workshop of the State Railways. The original nameplate has been placed back by the door.
The hallway provides access to the kitchen on the left, the staircase with a semicircular wall behind it, and the living spaces on the right. The kitchen has a small cellar space. The living area encompasses a space for work, dining, and living. The spaces are not separated by walls but by undulating lines in the ceiling consisting of curved slats on softboard. Above the worktable, a light canopy of tube lamps has been created. Your attention is immediately drawn to the living space by the curved wall with a large window in it. The radiator beneath the windowsill is curved, and the floor, like the rest of this room, is made of wood but laid in a different pattern. Between the living and workspace, the doors to the garden at the front of the house are located. The rear facade was placed on the boundary of the plot at that time, which is why there is no door in that facade. Now that the plot behind this property has been incorporated, it seems a bit odd. The staircase leads centrally to the upper floor, where three rooms and a bathroom are located. The children's bedroom is the smallest room. All rooms have a washbasin. The master bedroom has a direct door to the bathroom. Both the master bedroom and the guest room have a door that opens onto the terrace above the curved extension of the ground floor. The most striking element in the master bedroom is the circular window over a metre in diameter. It resembles a porthole; moreover, downstairs, with the wooden paneling and chrome-trimmed details, and all the furniture designed by Van Ravesteyn, you get the feeling of being in a ship's interior.
Both houses are characterised by being designed from the interior, and the hand of the furniture maker is evident in both. Everything is carefully elaborated and detailed. Although Rietveld was much more radical in working without walls, Van Ravesteyn also applies this principle, albeit without sliding panels. Light, views, and creating space are aspects that can be found in both houses. The Rietveld Schröder House is now a museum, and visitors are allowed to walk through the house wearing slippers. The house of Van Ravesteyn is owned by Hendrick de Keyser and serves as both a museum house and a place where you can spend the night (known as "Monument en Bed"). There, you can truly experience the house. However, this experience comes 90 years after its construction in a somewhat changed environment, but that doesn't diminish the enjoyment. The same applies to the Rietveld Schröder House, which no longer overlooks the meadow but faces the elevated Waterlinieweg.
Art critic W.J. de Gruyter describes the difference between Van Ravesteyn and Rietveld as follows: "Whereas Van Ravesteyn, in contrast to Rietveld, who can primarily be seen as a pioneer, always exhibits the finishing touch, the element of utmost care, of completeness... In Rietveld, the craftsman predominates... whereas Van Ravesteyn exhibits a clearer, more abstract, and aesthetic aspect in his work." Fellow architect Jan Buys wrote about Van Ravesteyn,"The lineament, airy and playful, appears as the liberation from overly rigid concentration in the era of linear orthodoxy, yet it is never intentional but the typical expression of a lordly attitude toward life." Similarly, one could describe the Rietveld Schröder House as an expression of its designer's character: principled, modest, with a lack of interest in material things. Utrecht is fortunate to have these two remarkable houses on Prins Hendriklaan.
2023
Do you want to see how the sliding panels work in the Rietveld Schröder House?
Sources
- Rietveld Schröderhuis, Centraal Museum Utrecht, 2017
- Gerrit Rietveld, Weelde van de eenvoud, Arjan Bronkhorst 2018
- Sybold van Ravesteyn, architect, Kees Rouw, 2014