ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the house in modernism often served as a preeminent platform to explore new and better ways of living. Rather than provide mere domesticity, the modern house often aimed to instruct regarding new formal and material means, and the capacity of the house to improve society. The Schröder House in Utrecht, designed by Gerrit Rietveld in collaboration with the owner and interior designer, Truus Schröder, and completed in 1924, can be understood as a built manifesto. Located at the end of a block of brick row houses on a site that originally faced open land, its size and scale respected its context. In The Natural House, Wright obliquely dismissed Le Corbusier as a latecomer, a "Swiss discoverer". For Le Corbusier, "the problem of the house is the problem of the epoch", and the redemption of architecture and society, requires the "pure" and the "abstract", as epitomized by the eponymous engineer – and Le Corbusier's Purism.
