Rietveld Schrder House - Essay Example

Introduction Rietveld Schröder House has been described as the only architectural piece realized, based on the principles of De Stijil. De stijil was a group of architects and artists of the 1920s, popularly known for their use of yellow, blue and red colours in combination with black, grey and white. In fact, one of the treasures inside this house is the famous Red Blue chair (Mulder and Zijl, 38). House VI forms the second built work of Eisenman. This came after the ‘Venna Venturi House’. It includes huge disorientation from his previous work, and without any concept that would relate it to the customary home. The design of the house originated from a conceptual process that started with a grid. Eisenman worked on the grid in such a way that the house had four distinct sections (Weston 78). In terms of structure, the two storeys by Rietveld Schröder House got designed in a way that the inside is a vibrant changeable open zone (Emmons and Mindrup 45). The inside has no static amassing of rooms. In the ground floor, the designer maintained some traditional aspects. It hosts three bedrooms/sitting rooms and a kitchen. The upstairs of this house obtained a design to conform with all fire regulations and planning authorities requirements. Except for a separate bathroom and toilet, the rest of the upstairs consists of a large open zone (Davi 46). Mrs Schroder felt that this living area should be functional in either form, whether subdivided or open. As such, a system of sliding as well as revolving panels took their place. This would open up space on the second floor, and at the same time leave an option of closing or partitioning the rooms when necessary (Emmons and Mindrup 47). The entirely partitioned upstairs comprises of a bathroom, living room and three bedrooms. This plan provides a wide range of possible permutations, each permutation providing a distinct spatial experience. The outlook of this house represents a random collection lines and planes whose components are separate from one another, enabling the house to have several balconies. The distinctive features of the components include colour, position and form. Different colours were chosen to strengthen the liveliness of the facades, with black door and window frames, surfaces in white colour and shades of grey, and several linear elements in all the primary colours (Emmons and Mindrup 54). The planes flow in a unique way, from outside to inside, and hence there is a slight distinction between exterior and interior space. In order to uphold design standards of intersecting planes and blur the demarcation of inside and outside, windows get hinged so that they only open at 90 degrees to the walls. The fact that Eisenman was a theorist and lacked the practicality in actual designs could be taken to mean that the designer lacked explicit construction experience. Eisenman crafts the design through methodological manipulation of a grid (Weston 89). The house was built using beam and post system. The intersection of four planes was consequently manipulated repeatedly until coherent spaces began to emerge. It is worth to note that due to this manipulation, the structure has fragmented columns and slabs which lack a traditional purpose or even a usual modern purpose. Some beams and columns play no structural role and are fundamentally incorporated to augment the conceptual design. For instance, there is a column that hangs over the kitchen table. The house is characterized by beams which meet but do not traverse. Eisenman incorporated the structure into his grid, consequently creating interior spaces with multiple planes that crossed through each other. Though these may be unconventional to live with, they are well lit and peculiar. Eisenman made it hard for the user to enable the user get accustomed to the architecture. For example, a glass slot in the centre wall of the bedroom divides the room into half, separating the two beds located on either side of the room. This implies that a couple would have no choice but sleep apart from each other (Weston 78). Another peculiar aspect of this design is the upside down of staircase. The staircase clearly depicts the axis of the house. In order to draw more attention, the staircase is painted in red. Eisenman incorporates many difficult aspects into this house. For example, there is a column that hovers over the dining table and separates diners, and a single bathroom that can only be accessed through a bedroom. Rietveld attended architectural classes between 1908 and 1915. In 1917, Rietveld began a furniture design and construction business in Holland (Davi 50). His furniture structures from the onset continue to get increasingly simplified and reduced to planar elements - as exemplified by his famous Red-Blue chair of 1918. It is from these furniture designs that Rietveld began to design storefronts and small interiors. In 1924, Rietveld collaborated with Mrs Truus Schroder on the design of her new house in the outskirts of Utrecht. This house has been famed due to its spatial transitions created by distinct planar elements. The doors, windows and walls are variously overlapped, physically separated and differently coloured. This can be described as remarkably dynamic since its first study model was a painted wood mass. It is worth noting that even during the years before the Rietveld Schröder House; Rietveld used cardboards to construct models of architectural interiors for his himself and colleagues. For example, in 1923, Rietveld was engaged in the construction of two cardboard architectural models. One of these models was for interior design with Destijl painter and designer, and the other was for van Doesburg’s hotel project. The model for the Rietveld Schröder House could have been developed in the same way, but instead Rietveld chose to have it as a mass model. Eisenman reveals that the design of House VI represents all his earlier design works compressed into a single frame. He introduced color in this project diagrams since the co-temporality could not be explicated in black and white. House VI was no longer a representation of a diagrammatic process, but rather a real process, and hence colouring was not only done to the diagrams but also to the house itself. House VI diagrams clearly showed the wall surfaces by notations of solid, double solid, neutral solid, single void and double void. Of all previous Eisenman’s works, House VI was his first undertaking to code the materiality of the house in a diagram. Therefore, it becomes inevitable for House VI to code the shift from Euclidian to topological geometry. As such, the house got keyed along topological axis that ran from one corner of the top rear to one corner in the bottom front, through a diagonal centre. To articulate this axis, a mixture of red and green was painted to two staircases, clearly producing the neutral axis of the house (Weston 78). As opposed to his first four houses in which white were the base colour, the central topological axis of this house was marked in grey. As such, one pole was white, with a grey line at the centre as the neutral axis, and the other pole made black, presenting an imagined exterior enclosure (Frank 7). Both Red and Green colours were aimed to conceptualize the neutral topological axis. The red staircase turns at 90 degrees, making it is asymmetrical in Euclidian space but symmetrical topologically along a line from the bottom corner to the top corner of the house. Combination of red and green in the staircase portrays an idea of a grey topological axis. In the design of House VI, actual Euclidian geometry of space comes out clearly, but this space could be understood on a topological perspective. This is because the house made no conceptual sense when experienced with Euclidian coordinates. It was noted that there were no facades, and the front and back exterior vertical surfaces were inversions of each other. This house was not only upside down topologically, but also upside down (Frank 5). The grey line was the topological axis, with a white dot at the centre. A black box surrounds the grey line, and all the horizontal and vertical surfaces of the house are coloured in various shades of grey. House VI became a kaleidoscope of diagrams, though the diagrams were not the house itself, the house can be seen as a summation of the process. Conclusions On a comparative perspective, this paper has carefully reviewed the existing comparisons between the two architectural designs. House VI was designed as a summation of the previous paper works by Peter Eisenman, bringing his general theoretical designs into real practice. With distinctive spatial qualities, Rietveld Schröder House was developed in the 1920s, long before House VI. Based on the principles of De Stijil, the house has been described as an architectural masterpiece, whose design is highly admired in the fields of art and architecture. Works Cited Davi, Colin. “Key Buildings of the Twentieth Century: Plans, Sections and Elevations.” London: Lawrence King Publishing. (2006). Emmons, P and Mindrup, M. “Paradigm models and Immaterial paradigms in the Rietveld Schröder House”. Journal of Architectural Education. Pp. 44-52. 3 January, 2014 Frank, Suzanne. “Peter Eisenmans House VI: The Clients Response.” New York: Watson-Guptil Publications. (1994). Mulder, Bertus and Zijl, Ida. “Rietveld Schröder House” Newyork: Princeton Architectural Press. (1999). Weston, Richard. “Plans, Sections and Elevations: Key Buildings of the Twentieth Century.” Lawrence King Publishing. (2004). Read More