3/ SCHROEDER GERRIT RIETVELD’S HOUSE
1924
© Centraal Museum, Utrecht Ernst Moritz / ARS
3/ Schroeder Gerrit Rietveld’s House, 1924
It is often said that Rietveld and Truus Schroeder’s plan for the house is a three-dimensional realization of the principles of abstract painter Piet Mondrian. The house even more calls to mind the work of the Russian Suprematists—Malevich’s “arkhitektons” and Lissitzky’s “prouns”.
Gerrit Rietveld, the chief Dutch modernist architect, built this home for the widow Truus Schroeder-Schraeder and her three children, and lived there himself as well.
© MidMod-Design
3/ Schroeder Gerrit Rietveld’s House, 1924
Kim Zwarts © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pictoright Amsterdam
What it certainly does not look like is the “normal” modernist house: too much color, too many details unrelated to function.
Nonetheless, it is the predecessor of the modernist house. The Schroeder house is one of the daring early experiments on which the architecture of modernism was built.
3/ Schroeder Gerrit Rietveld’s House — Gallery
Kim Zwarts © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / Pictoright Amsterdam
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Gerrit Rietveld: The Architect and Designer © Phaidon Press
4/ KONSTANTIN MELNIKOV’S HOUSE
1927–1929
© Igor Palmin
4/ Konstantin Melnikov’s House, 1927–1929
© Wikipedia
The home is made up of two cylinders with honeycombed walls and a single bedroom for the entire family. The house is an architectural masterpiece, is celebrated worldwide and is one of the top attractions for foreign tourists to Moscow.
All 20th-century architects built homes for themselves, all except Soviet architects, in whose country stand-alone residences ran against the powerful Socialist tide. How Melnikov managed to evade these constraints is a mystery and our good fortune that providence happened to smile on this wildest of all the dreamers of the Soviet avant-garde.
4/ Konstantin Melnikov’s House, 1927–1929
Living room © All photos by Igor Palmin
But, for Russians, it is important not so much as an architectural wonder but as a cultural anomaly: a single-family home built during the era of the accursed “apartment question” with the inscription, “Konstantin Melnikov architect”, proudly displayed over the entrance and with an enormous, bright, cathedral-like studio on the third floor, all of it bespeaking Melnikov’s pride in a profession little recognized in the USSR, whose members were treated as anonymous functionaries of design institutes and slaves of the building industry.