B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

I had a tour of the Schröder house in Utrecht twenty-five years ago, just a few months before I finally got to see the inside of the Maison de Verre in Paris. The two houses, designed respectively in 1924 and 1928, say a lot about the heroic period of European modernism. The Schröder house, designed by Gerrit Rietveld and Truus Schröder, is spatially explosive, but it is realized with Dutch bluntness. One sheet of timber overlaps another. Nothing is politely hidden away. Its still impressive to see in the flesh, but its clear that some of the perceived spatial complexity of Rietveld’s design comes from the fact it was photographed with every window open at ninety degrees. The Maison de Verre is an exquisitely crafted and luxurious celebration of machinery and mechanisms. I know which one I would rather live in, and it’s not just because the Maison de Verre is on a turning off the Boulevard Saint-Michel, close by the Café de Flore, and the Schröder house confronts the elevated motorway that skirts Utrecht.

In theory, the architecture of the twentieth century was driven by mass culture and social housing. In practice, it’s possible to tell most of the history of modernism through a careful selection of individual houses very few of which score well for affordability. The Maison de Verre and the Rietveld house certainly qualify as architectural landmarks. They also provide a reflection on what happens to remarkable houses once the people who first lived in them have gone.

Rietveld and his client Truus Schröder were both married to other people when they first met. They spent their last years together in the house, which is in the care of Utrecht’s Centraal Museum now. Every trace of the personality of the extraordinary individuals who made it have gone. Visitors are admitted in carefully controlled groups and, at least when I visited, expected to wear paper overshoes. It makes the place feel not like a house but like a laboratory, clean, secure, but stripped of so much of its meaning.

The Maison de Verre is different. Dr Jean Dalsace, the gynaecologist who had commissioned Pierre Chareau to build it, had died some years before I saw the house. His consulting room and surgery were no longer in use, but the place was still owned by the Dalsace family. It was open to the public only haphazardly. While it was still clearly a house, it was not the home that it had once been - a salon for progressive French intellectuals in the 1930s. Its qualities were fading, the rubber floor had turned brittle, the volumes on the bookshelves were unloved and unread.

Since then, the house has been acquired by Robert Rubin, an American former commodity trader and enthusiast for the work of both Jean Prouvé and Pierre Chareau, who is working on a careful restoration, as patient and organized as his approach to the vintage cars that were an earlier passion for him.

The relationship between houses and the people who make them is fragile. John Soane turned his house in London into a museum, and that is what gives it a robustness that withstands the presence of so many visitors.

To visit the house that Alvar Aalto built outside Paris in 1959 for the art dealer Louis Carré shortly after it was acquired by a foundation was a privilege, because you could still feel the presence of its owner. It was there in the Chanel suits hanging in his wife Olga’s wardrobe, and in the copy of Vers une architecture inscribed by Le Corbusier to Carré - they used to live in the same building. I was able to experience this because there were so few of us there on the day. A house fully open to the public can’t have that quality.

Pierre Chareau was a small, dapper man with a weakness for double-breasted suits and silk handkerchiefs. To look at his picture, you would never think he could have been responsible, with the Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet, for designing one of the most extraordinary houses of the twentieth century. Legally, Chareau was not entitled to call himself an architect. He studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, then took up music before finally becoming apprenticed to a furniture maker. When he set up on his own, he designed interiors, one-off furniture for a few loyal clients, and the occasional film set.

For Chareau, however, the point of life was not to indulge in novelty for the sake of novelty, but the pursuit of perfection. And the Maison de Verre, the house that he built at 31 rue Saint-Guillaume, has been designed in every detail, from the soaring spaces of the living room to the soap dish in the bathroom, to be perfect. Even the coat hangers are specially made.

The façade is the house’s most striking, but also most beautiful, feature. Square dimpled glass bricks, held in black-painted steel frames that have the delicacy of Japanese paper screens, create an all-glass wall three floors high. It floods the interior with light, but is patterned in such a way as to stop passers-by from seeing in. The interiors, planned around a double-height studio space, are equally radical.

The idea of using perforated aluminium sheets on the walls instead of wallpaper, leaving huge steel girders, rivets bulging like those at the lower reaches of the Eiffel Tower, exposed in the living room, and putting studded rubber on the floor in a comfortable bourgeois home simply hadn’t occurred to anybody before. ‘I recall a lady who just could not bring herself to go up the stairs in the Maison de Verre as there was neither a rail, nor stair risers,’ wrote one contemporary friend of the owners. Instead of conventional opening windows, there were ventilation hoppers, controlled by specially made flywheels, like something out of a power station. Le Corbusier was said to have been spotted hanging around the site, lost in wonder at the remarkable stream of objects that he saw going in.

The Maison de Verre is one of the handful of buildings that have the energy and the imagination to be able to change everything that follows them. Charles Eames’s house in Los Angeles was equally influential. Frank Gehry’s own house from the 1980s in Santa Monica or Rem Koolhaas’s house outside Bordeaux are probably the most recent examples of this exceptional breed. They depend on an individual designer, like Chareau, who is bursting with ideas, unwilling to take anything on trust, and determined to rethink literally every detail,

The project did not succeed in rescuing Chareau, who was notoriously bad at business, from his financial difficulties. He had to sell off the remarkable collection of art that he had acquired in his more prosperous days after the First World War. The Braque and the Picasso that used to hang on the walls of his apartment, the Mondrian from his office, all had to go. The Modigliani sculpture that he kept in his garden belongs to New York’s Museum of Modern Art now. When the Nazis invaded France, Chareau fled to America, where he struggled to make a living. His only major work in the US, where he died in 1950, was a studio in the Hamptons for the American painter Robert Motherwell, which involved recycling a war surplus prefabricated army hut, and combining it with a greenhouse. But even that has been demolished now, as has the hotel that Chareau built in Tours, leaving not much more than a collection of exquisite specially designed furniture that survives from Chareau’s period as a decorator, and the Maison de Verre itself.

The Dalsace family were long-standing friends of Chareau and his English-born wife, Louise Dyte. Chareau had already designed an apartment for them. But building the Maison de Verre took four difficult years, in part because the sitting tenant on the second floor of the property that the Dalsace family had acquired with an eye to demolition refused to budge. So Chareau worked out how to jack up her floor, demolish the rest of the building from underneath her, leaving just an access staircase, and insert his house into the gap. There were few working drawings, just some careful sketches, and a lot of improvisation on site. That was how Chareau liked to work. ‘The inventiveness of the builder should be respected and encouraged in architecture as in furniture. The craftsman will hit upon ideas that the designer or planner would never have dreamed of,’ Chareau said. At the Maison de Verre, Chareau did exactly that, relying on his loyal metal fabricator, Louis Dalbert, who was left exhausted and ruined by the process.

The front of the house is made up of a double-height living room on the two floors above the surgery. Bedrooms are on the top floor, while dining and more private spaces are at the back of the house, overlooking the garden. The bathroom cupboards swing out on carefully balanced pivots to reveal a drawer and a rack for every conceivable need that he or his clients could ever have envisaged. To make sure that electricians would never need to damage walls and floors to get at the wiring, Chareau put all the cables in free-standing metal tubes six inches clear of the walls. And to help his clients find their way in the dark, the light switches were pre-programmed to guide you through the house. One switch at the front door would see you all the way up into the bedroom.

Chareau’s inventiveness and elegance are there in every detail. The sadness is that he did not live long enough to build more.