Our annual theme for 2024 is Jakoba Mulders Soul Mates. The theme is a reference to Jakoba Mulder (1900-1988), an important architect and urban planner who played a major role in the development and expansion of the city of Amsterdam. Mulder is it The starting point for this year's theme. Soul mates refers to her female contemporaries, but also her contemporary female colleagues. On our website, we highlight a soul mate every month. This month, we're paying attention to architect and interior designer Han Schröder. She is the second female architect, after Jakoba Mulder, to register as an architect with the Dutch Architects Register.

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Han Schröder, was born in Utrecht in 1918 as the daughter of Truus and Frits Schröder. When she was five years old, her father died and her mother had a relationship with the famous architect and designer Gerrit Rietveld. Together, they designed the iconic Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, where Han grew up for most of her childhood.

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Lifecycle

As a young girl, she remembers the interesting conversations between her mother, Rietveld, and important designers who visited the house. As a result, she developed a great interest in design practice at an early age. When Truus Schröder and Rietveld started a design office on the ground floor of their house, Han was often allowed to help out. For example, as an eight-year-old girl, she was already tasked with finding out how to bend plywood without mechanical force. This resulted in Rietveld's famous stirrup chair, which later also influenced Alvar Aalto's wooden furniture.

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As a teenager, in addition to her role as Rietveld's assistant, she gained experience during her training with furniture maker Gerard van Groenekan. By 1936, her interest in design practice had grown so much that she decided to study architecture in Zurich, where she graduated in 1940. Due to the Second World War, she did not return to the Netherlands immediately after her studies, but took various jobs in Portugal and London. During this period, Siegfried Giedion also asks her to help edit his book. Space Time and Architecture. This eventually became one of the most influential architecture books of the twentieth century.

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They don't trust a woman to build a major project; they think building is not women's work. The only thing you can do by grace is to build youth homes and the like. Because a woman is closer to that, they say.

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After the Second World War, Han returned to the Netherlands, where it is not so easy to find a job as a woman at an architectural firm. She therefore started a job at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam where she organized various exhibitions, including the famous exhibition about Le Corbusier in 1947. In 1949, she worked for Rietveld for a period and contributed to many projects, including the Sonsbeek pavilion in Arnhem.

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In 1954, she started her own business as an architect and interior designer and one of the first orders she received was to build a house for her brother Binnert in Hattem. Her expertise lay in designing small spaces and optimizing them by means of sliding elements. The home of her childhood is a clear source of inspiration for this. For example, she designed a housing complex for retired community nurses in Austerlitz with sliding walls to alternate between private and communal areas. She received a lot of compliments about this from the women who ended up living there. In 1964, she decided to pursue another dream; she moved to the United States. Initially, she worked there at an architectural firm, but her design suggestions were often ignored because they did not take her seriously. So she started a career teaching interior architecture at several highly regarded institutions such as Parsons School of Design and New York Institute of Technology. She did this until she retired.

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As a woman in construction

In a 1959 interview in De Trouw, she explains what it was like to be an architect in a design world dominated by men. Despite the setbacks, she herself knew very well what her talents and qualities were and she often managed to convince her male colleagues of this. In a humorous way, she looks back on various situations at the construction site where she had to prove herself. For example, there was a glass plate that still had to be cut to the correct size. She moved the glass in an exaggerated way, grabbed a saw and cut off a piece of it. The male builders were watching with their mouths open. From that moment on, they did take her seriously.

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I say that something should happen so and so, and there is invariably a guy who says: “That's not possible, it can't be done.” All I do then is this: I pick up the saw, hammer, axe or whatever and go show it.

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To be a good architect, says Han, it's important to design a home that will still be a good home 50 years from now. As a progressive woman, she says that architects should ignore what the housewife wants, because they only look from the perspective of what they know at that moment.

Did Han Schröder already realize what major shifts would occur in terms of living and the place of women?

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Sources:

Rixt Hoekstra, “Learned young, done old?” , Centraal Museum website.

'She Builds' Podcast, episode by Hans Schroeder.

“Hannie Schröder: architect, student of Rietveld”, Trouw, September 25, 1959.

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