The stuff about effect on mood was all right. But then he got on to the kind of architecture he admires. There was the ghastly Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht, the Netherlands. A guide called it “a three-dimensional Mondrian painting”. She appeared to mean it as a compliment. The place looked like a controlled explosion of squares and lines. It wasn’t a home, it was a pattern. It contained a chair made of uncompromisingly flat panels of wood that, if you were masochistic enough to sit on it, would place your bottom about six inches off the floor. “This whole new way of thinking about a chair being an object in space was revolutionary,” cooed the guide. “The building becomes like a performance,” cooed Dyckhoff.