Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.A Piet Mondrian painting might appear to be as two-dimensional a work of art as you could find. Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House takes that same language and expands it into three dimensions, allowing you to move around inside an apparently abstract composition. A fourth dimension, time, has allowed this curious experiment to last for a century — the house kicks off centenary celebrations next week — yet still appear as modern and outlandish as it ever did. It is among the most radical and remarkable houses ever built, a dwelling that seems to be painted or collaged as much as constructed. It caused an outrage when it was finished in bourgeois Utrecht. But it is also, frankly, quite funny to look at. Like most architecture students of the late 20th century, I was exposed to images of this house ad infinitum. It was always presented as a kind of freestanding artwork, suspended in white space like the abstract paintings of the Suprematists, the Russian Constructivists or Dutch De Stijl artists such as Mondrian. It is slightly absurd then to find it rooted in a very real context, on the end of a rather grey and banal Dutch terrace. It is, perhaps, the most Modernist semi ever built. Rietveld (1888-1964) had trained as a carpenter and was already known for his furniture, notably his astonishing chair, originally black and white when made in 1917, later painted and dubbed the Red and Blue Chair. The pieces were striking graphic designs that appeared to be constructed without joints, just elements passing each other in space, rendered in the vivid planes of primary colours and sharp black lines that characterised the era’s most abstract art. His client for the house was Truus Schröder-Schräder, a newly widowed protofeminist, pharmacist and bohemian who wanted a house in which she could live freely with her three children. She persuaded Rietveld — who became her lover as well as her architect and ended up moving in after his own wife died — to create a home liberated from middle-class Dutch conservatism. There are no nurseries and the rooms are hardly demarcated, with sliding and pivoting panels and floor markings replacing the usual walls and doors. There is little privacy, notably on the top floor, but rather flowing, interlocking — and fascinating — spaces. From the outside, planes appear to hover in a complex spatial construction that is mostly white and grey, with dashes of De Stijl red and yellow in slender linear elements. Every room seems to have a balcony or terrace jutting out from it, freeing the interior from the rigid confines of the slender Dutch house plan. Rietveld wanted to use concrete for the surfaces but it proved too pricey so, like many early Modernist houses, it ended up being built of brick and rendered with plaster to make it look smooth and sleek. He never designed anything as good again, demonstrating the potential of having a strong, imaginative client. The house once sat on the edge of the city, turning its back on the terrace behind and looking out to open country. Now the city has expanded, absorbing the site, and an intimidating elevated freeway looms only a short distance away. When it was proposed, Schröder-Schräder threatened to demolish her house rather than see it defiled but, in the end, she stayed and lived here to the end of her long life in 1985. It is now owned by the city’s Centraal Museum and has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 2000. It remains one of the 20th century’s most incredible, enigmatic and brilliant houses. rietveldschroderhuis.nlFind out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on InstagramThis article has been amended to address an omission regarding Rietveld’s Red and Blue Chair
