Unlike other avant-garde magazine, De Stijl was spread internationally mostly in the years 1920-25. It attracted many great artists at the moment such as Picasso and Archipenko5 and exerted an astonishing influence on the Bauhaus. It was Piet Mondrian's theories about colour and space that formed the basis of De Stijl whereas Van Doesburg and the designer Gerrit Rietveld who transformed the De Stijl idea into the three dimensional world, architecture and furniture design. .
Gerrit Thomas Rietveld was a furniture specialist before he joined De Stijl in 1919. Even during this period, furniture making was his sole occupation. He had not achieved anything as an architect before the Schroder House. At the time, Rietveld was well known for his ˜Red and Blue Chair', characterized by clear compositions of planes and lines as well as the use of the three primary colours: red, blue and yellow. The ˜Red and Blue Chair' was quite a sensation in Dutch arts and crafts circle due to the uncommonly use of painted furniture in the Netherland during the first decades of this century. Furniture was usually left in wood tones and different kind of woods or staining were used to obtain shades and contrasts.6.
The Schroder House was based on the same principles as his furniture designs and De Stijl characteristics: reducing the elements by making them into basic geometric forms, the asymmetrical composition and the exclusive use of orthogonal (horizontal and vertical lines and planes) painted like the Mondrian's compositions of Red, Yellow and Blue paintings. .
Rietveld was influenced a lot by his teacher Hendrick Petrus Berlage who was known as the father of modern architecture in Holland. He was the first person in the Netherlands to promulgate ˜the importance of space' as a fundamental quality of architecture. 7.
This idea is linked to Rietveld's pursuit of ˜space, which is the reality that architecture can create'.