Very good, Henri. I agree that teh Reitveld house does express "plasticity" as
iunderstood in the 20th century and rejects prior mono-materiality of
previous means of construction, ie. all of the brick buidings surrounding it.
It is clearly an object of this century and an industrial realization vs.
a hand-crafted building. But, at its roots is a basic austerity, a rich
austerity, I attribute much of this tendency to the Swiss-Dutch Calvinist
connection, and it can be seen in the work of Mies van der Rohe as weell.
At least heis early work, ie. Barcelona Pavillion.
Mies is much tru4er to the materials, although at times, especially in his later
Chicago work, he did become decorative. Rietveld was enchanted by "paint"
and this is where his denial of materials exists. But, the contruction
and the fixtures are incredible in their simplitcity. The thing that I
personally
find most appealing about the Rietveld-Schroeder house is that they
realized that the most plastic element in the house was the "human", and
that every space was multifunctional. That is quite a break from the past
and even quite a break from the "form follows function" of Art Nouveau and
the early Modernists.
- Ray Lauzzana
iunderstood in the 20th century and rejects prior mono-materiality of
previous means of construction, ie. all of the brick buidings surrounding it.
It is clearly an object of this century and an industrial realization vs.
a hand-crafted building. But, at its roots is a basic austerity, a rich
austerity, I attribute much of this tendency to the Swiss-Dutch Calvinist
connection, and it can be seen in the work of Mies van der Rohe as weell.
At least heis early work, ie. Barcelona Pavillion.
Mies is much tru4er to the materials, although at times, especially in his later
Chicago work, he did become decorative. Rietveld was enchanted by "paint"
and this is where his denial of materials exists. But, the contruction
and the fixtures are incredible in their simplitcity. The thing that I
personally
find most appealing about the Rietveld-Schroeder house is that they
realized that the most plastic element in the house was the "human", and
that every space was multifunctional. That is quite a break from the past
and even quite a break from the "form follows function" of Art Nouveau and
the early Modernists.
- Ray Lauzzana