8 Handoutdestijl

ARCT 20040 HISTORY AND THEORY OF THE DESIGNED ENVIRONMENT III
Week 7: De Stijl
The life of contemporary, cultivated man is turning gradually away from nature, it becomes more
and more an a-b-s-t-r-a-c-t life (Piet Mondrian, 1917). Like some modern artists movements the origins
of de Stijl lay in a reaction to the First World War which suggested the future of humanity somehow
rested upon a unification the arts. Moreover, as described in the first manifesto, this endeavour should be
carried out collectively, excessive individuality being seen as one of the causes of WWI. Unlike the
Futurists, however, De Stijl, was never a coherent artistic group but rather a loose collection of
individuals who tended to gravitate around the figure of Theo van Doesburg, co-creator and editor of the
journal De Stijl which was published from May 1917 until 1928. De Stijl (sometimes called Neo-
Plasticism) advocated a move away from figurative, representational painting and sculpture towards
abstraction which sought to describe what lay behind ʻthe accident of appearanceʼ. In other words, they
were in search of universal, objective laws, an essential ordering of structure which would function as a
sign for an ethical view of society: a synthesis of ethics and aesthetics. The works of the co-creator of De
Stijl, the painter Piet Mondrian highlight this shift. Beginning as a fairly conventional representational
painter indiscriminately influenced by the trends of the time – symbolism, art nouveau, expressionism –
after 1916 Mondrian began stripping away at what he considered to extraneous material to achieve a
geometrical style of orthogonal grids of black or grey lines containing panels of primary colour, blue,
red, yellow, or non-colour, white. To begin with these paintings, which he called compositions, were
arranged intuitively but later were ordered using mathematical formulae. Influenced by theosophy, the
geometric purity of horizontal and vertical lines was considered by Mondrian to embody an almost divine
sense of geometry. The sense of a unified fragmentation displayed in Mondrianʼs work was a key motif
in other works. This was somewhat difficult to achieve in architecture: Oudʼs façade for the Café De Unie
echoes a Mondrian painting but doesnʼt really extend its qualities into a third dimension. Oud was a
member of De Stijl in its early years, but left after a quarrel with Van Doesberg – he was not the only one
to do so, ultimately even Mondrian left after dispute van Doesburgʼs introduction of the diagonal). It was
left to a furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld (in conjunction with Truus Schroeder) to produce De Stijlʼs
most convincing piece of architecture, the Schroeder House in 1924. This, however, was after he had
designed his famous red/blue chair. This apparent embodiment of de Stijl principles, the pulling apart of
its constituent elements, the back, seat, supports and armrests – as well as the invention of the critical
crossing joint – which are then reconfigured as a conceived whole, actually predated his membership of
de Stijl and was only painted in the characteristic primary colours later. The chairs had a poem by
Christian Morgenstern glued to them: When I sit, I do not care just to sit my hindside: I prefer the
way my mid-side would, to sit in, build a chair. The Schroeder House, designed to accommodate the
widow Mrs Schroeder and her three children, tended to embody as much of Mrs Schroederʼs own ideas
about living, pedagogy and society as those of de Stijl. The upper part of the house could be arranged in
seven different ways and involved a series of sliding partitions to increase privacy or encourage
interaction as required. At the corner, the window was designed to dissolve away the distinction
between outside and inside and show that the house had not been made using traditional load bearing
masonry. Its appearance, like Van Doesburg and Cor van Eesternʼs counterconstructions of 1922,
seemed to derive from a centrifugal force which fragments the buildingʼs envelop towards the countryside
beyond. Despite the fact that Rietveld had refused the participation of van Doesburg and Van der Leck
on the colour-scheme, the former was delighted and based some of the 16 points of his text ʻTowards a
Plastic Architectureʼ (1924) on the building, for example: ʻ15 The new architecture is anti-
decorative. Colour is not a decorative part of architecture but its organic medium of expressionʼ.
Mondrian, Tableau 1 1921 Oud, Café De Unie 1925 Rietveld, red/blue chair 1918
References (key texts in bold): Paul Overy, De Stijl GEN 709.492/OVE, a good introduction to De Stijl ideas and projects; Mildred
Friedman (ed.) De Stijl 1917-1931: Visions of Utopia, esp. essays by Kenneth Frampton, pp 99-124 and Nancy Troy pp 165-189 Res
709.492; Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age pp 139-162 and 185-201, GenSlc 724/BAN; Theo Van
Doesberg, ʻTowards a Plastic Architectureʼ in Ulrich Conrads, Programmes and manifestoes on 20th century architecture, pp 78-80
GenRes 724.9/CON; Alice T. Friedman, Women and the Making of the Modern House, Chapter 2, ʻFamily Matters: The Schroeder
Houseʼ pp 64-92 Res 728/FRI; Carsten-Peter Warncke, De Stijl 1917-1931, Gen 709.492, some of the best illustrations of the De Stijl
projects.

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ARCT 20040 HISTORY AND THEORY OF THE DESIGNED ENVIRONMENT III

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