10/23/2026
3 Modernist Architects & the Art that shaped their work
Top: Piet Mondrian, 1921 / Bottom: Rietveld Schröder House, Utrecht
In 1917, Dutch artists including Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg founded De Stijl, a movement that stripped art down to horizontal and vertical lines, flat planes and primary color. Gerrit Rietveld brought it into three dimensions, first with his Red Blue Chair, then in 1924 with this house in Utrecht, designed with Truus Schröder. Walls, beams and windows act like the planes in a painting, with color saved for the lines. Upstairs, sliding walls turn one open room into three bedrooms and a sitting room. It’s often called a Mondrian you can walk into.
Top: Hiroshige, Maples at Mama, c. 1857 / Bottom: Marion Mahony’s rendering of Wright’s DeRhodes House, 1906
Frank Lloyd Wright fell for Japanese woodblock prints in the 1890s and became one of America’s leading print dealers. He sailed to Japan in 1905 in pursuit of prints, staged the first Hiroshige exhibition in the US in 1906, and more than once, print sales saved him from financial ruin. You can see the influence in how his studio drew his houses: tall, vertical compositions with foliage framing the view, the way Hiroshige framed a landscape. Wright even annotated this 1906 rendering by Marion Mahony: “after FLLW and Hiroshige.”
Top: a Chucho Reyes rooster / Bottom: Casa Gilardi pool by Luis Barragan, Mexico City
Luis Barragán met Le Corbusier in Paris in 1931, and his first Mexico City buildings in the late 1930s showed Le Corbusier’s influence. Over time he turned toward what he called an “emotional architecture.” One of his guides was his friend Chucho Reyes, a self-taught painter and antiques dealer who painted roosters in bright aniline dye on tissue paper he first used for wrapping. Accepting the Pritzker Prize in 1980, Barragán publicly acknowledged his “indebtedness” to Reyes’s “wise teachings.” For Casa Gilardi, finished in 1977, they chose the colors by painting large card sheets and leaning them against the walls of Barragán’s house, moving them around until they were right.
