Gerrit Rietveld's Schröder House is the three-dimensional manifesto of the idea — the De Stijl movement — of turning a building from a closed mass into a composition of planes and lines floating freely in space. The language of right-angled planes and primary colours in Mondrian's paintings is here translated into a livable space.

The traditional house is a box closed by walls meeting at corners. Rietveld deliberately breaks this box: walls, balcony slabs, roof planes, and steel beams are slid, overlapped, and left free rather than meeting at the corners, as if independent of one another. Surfaces are painted white, grey, and black; linear elements (beams, railings) red, yellow, and blue — so that each element reads as a separate plane or line and the whole sense of a 'monolithic mass' disperses. The building looks not like a frozen object but like a composition suspended in air.

The most radical part of the house is the upper floor: there is almost no fixed interior wall. The whole upper floor is by day a single open space; in the evening it is divided into bedrooms by drawing sliding and folding partitions. The plan is not fixed but a system changed by the user through the day — a modern, abstract echo of Katsura's flexible space. The Schröder House is a small but era-defining laboratory showing the modern ideals of the 'free plan', the 'dissolved box', and the 'continuity of space' in their purest, most experimental form.