De Stijl (The Style) was an early twentieth-century avant-garde movement founded by two Dutch artists, Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg, in 1917. Mondrian and van Doesburg believed that their style of art, based on strict geometric forms and a simplified color pallet, would bring unity to the world.
“The ultimate goal of the movement was to achieve the triumph of absolute harmony over an imperfect and chaotic world, a Utopian ideal most explicitly formulated by Mondrian,” explains Maarten Doorman, a scholar of art and literary criticism at the University of Amsterdam.
The group published their ideas, known early on as neoplasticism (Nieuwe Beelding), through the magazine De Stijl, whose title eventually became the popular name of their movement. Van Doesburg served as the magazine’s editor and would remain its champion throughout his life.
De Stijl’s theories were a product of their time. Dutch artists and architects found themselves surrounded by the Great War, which raged across Europe. Yet, they were also entirely removed from most of the brutalities, as the Netherlands remained neutral throughout the war. But this removal from war’s true horrors brought a bit of naivety to the movement.
“When the World War was mentioned in its journal,” Doorman notes,
the tone was not one of pessimism about mankind, but rather of near-triumph, for example, where it observed that the “World War” had now definitively destroyed old culture. And, while large-scale armies were attacking one another with a vast arsenal of technological advancements, De Stijl architects and theorists were observing great opportunities for a better world based on this massive scale and these new technologies.
De Stijl’s ideas about art began with two-dimensional forms like painting. Today these works are well defined by Mondrian’s legacy, with his rigid paintings of black-and-white grids, sprinkled with rectangular forms in red, yellow, and blue. However, other members of De Stijl sought to move their ideas into three-dimensional forms. Architects such as J. J. P. Oud and Robert van ’t Hoff joined the movement with the intention of being De Stijl architects.
While van Doesburg supported the exploration of three-dimensional forms, Mondrian struggled to accept the inclusion of architecture, Yve-Alain Bois explains. “As early as 1922,” he writes,
Mondrian noted that the realization of neoplasticism in architecture was almost impossible, given existing economic and technical conditions, and declared openly, “What was achieved in art must for the present be limited to art. Our external environment cannot yet be realized as the pure plastic expression of harmony.”
Mondrian believed that De Stijl architecture could come, but it wasn’t able to accurately express the movement’ theories at that time. This was quite an affront to the members of De Stijl who believed otherwise.
Today the Rietveld Schröder House, built in 1924, is the best-known example of De Stijl architecture. The house was built for Truus Schröder-Schräder, a recent widow and mother of three children. Having worked with Rietveld previously, Schröder-Schräder believed him to be the ideal designer to build an unconventional house that would best suit the needs of her family. The two collaborated on the design.
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The exterior of the house resembles a three-dimensional De Stijl painting. The structure is covered with flat planes of shades of white and gray, while the occasional architectural elements painted in a primary color stand out noticeably. Rietveld’s architectural design emphasized the geometric forms of the building in the same way as would a De Stijl painting.
Its interior is just as significant. The open floor plan and flexible design cemented it as an icon of modern architecture.
“The house is famous for its flowing spatial transitions created by distinct planar elements,” write Paul Emmons and Matthrew Mindrup. “The second floor’s continuous interior space is articulated and adapted to different uses by sliding and swinging surfaces that engage the inhabitants in the transformation of the house.”
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Those “sliding and swinging surfaces” allowed for the family to have an open living space during the day and partition the space in the evenings for privacy.
Mondrian officially left De Stijl in 1923. It’s long been stated that his departure was the result of a disagreement with van Doesburg over the use of diagonal lines in De Stijl artworks, which van Doesburg supported and Mondrian was against. Doorman highlights more recent scholarship that argues that this is an oversimplification of what were larger theoretical differences between the movement’s two founders.
While other members of De Stijl came and went, van Doesburg remained the movement’s leader until the end. He had his own ventures into architecture, collaborating on the never-built La Maison d’Artiste with Cornelis van Eesteren and designing the interior of Café L’Aubette in Strasbourg, France. He published De Stijl magazine until his death in 1931. The last issue came out in 1932, under the direction of his wife, Nelly, dedicated to his memory and produced with the collaboration of active and former members of De Stijl.
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