The Modern Interior

Theo van Doesburg and Cornelis van Eesteren, a draft in pencil, gouache and collage for
Amsterdam University Hall, 1923.
strong and appropriately modern frame for the students living within it, for
example. The ten rooms, created by van Doesburg together with Hans Arp
and Sophie Taeuber-Arp for the Café Aubette in Strasbourg, built between
1926 and 1928, were among the most striking of all the De Stijl public
interiors. The aim was to create ‘a harmonious whole that conveyed the
dynamic quality of modern urban life’. 9 The cinema-dance hall represented
the realization of all the interior strategies that the ‘coloristes’ and
the architects had developed together over the previous decade. It was a
highly complex, dramatic space dominated by diagonal lines used to mobilize
it spatially and to demarcate blocks of colour. The hall was one of the
most abstract of all the De Stijl interiors and, not surprisingly, in advance
of the taste of the public for which it had been created. 10
With its spatially-inspired form and human scale the cabinetmaker/architect,
Gerrit Rietveld’s ‘Red/Blue’ chair looked deceptively like
a ‘sitting-object’, albeit an uncomfortable one. In reality, however, it was an
abstract, sculptural exercise composed of intersecting and overlapping
planes cutting through space. The first version was made of plain wood
but in a later version Rietveld added basic colours as a means of reinforcing
the chair’s planar intersections. He abandoned the idea of working
with mass in favour of articulating space, a strategy he was able to apply
as equally to a house as to a chair. His design for the inside of the home of
the widowed Mrs Truus-Schroeder and her three children was a prime
example of an interior design that embodied the De Stijl group’s ideas 173