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In 1928, the Jewish-German industrialist Fritz Tugendhat and Greta Löw-Beer, received a valuable piece of land from Greta’s father as a wedding gift. The land was located on a hill with a view of the center of Brno, Czechoslovakia. The couple decided to build a four-bedroom house on the land and commissioned the renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design it. At that time, Mies van der Rohe was on his way to becoming the final director of the Bauhaus and a prominent figure in Modernism. The villa he created for the Tugendhats became an iconic symbol of the movement.
The three-storey house, made of concrete and glass, was built into the hillside. It embraced simplicity by minimizing ornamentation, but its opulent finishes added a touch of grandeur. Mies van der Rohe and interior designer Lilly Reich selected exotic hardwood partitions, as well as travertine marble floors and stairs, to enhance the luxurious feel of the villa. According to the villa’s guide, Zdenka Obrová, the Tugendhats had to hide their paintings whenever Mies van der Rohe visited.
Upon entering the house at the top level, visitors would descend through the sleeping quarters to reach the spacious open-plan living area, commonly referred to as the “glass room” in Simon Mawer’s novel about the villa. Mies van der Rohe’s innovative decision to support the reinforced concrete floors solely on slender cruciform steel columns, covered in shiny chrome in the public areas, allowed the mid-level of 237 square meters to be surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows on two and a half sides.
There are only two partitions within the living space, both serving as sculptural elements: a semicircular Macassar ebony screen enclosing the 24-seat dining table and an onyx wall made of polished honey-colored stone from the Atlas Mountains. The onyx wall separated Fritz Tugendhat’s workspace and library from the salon area, and it emitted an orange glow on sunny winter evenings.
The bottom level of the villa houses the mechanical services, which are designed to work quietly and maintain the tranquility of the living space above. This level includes boilers and a black-tiled coal bunker. An ingenious air-conditioning system draws air from the street, passing it over boxes of beach pebbles and through straw bales before pumping it up to the room above.
Fritz, Greta, and their three children enjoyed living in the villa for eight years until they were forced to leave the country due to the Nazi threat. Over the years, the villa witnessed various historical events in central Europe. It served as a Gestapo headquarters, a stable for the horses of the liberating Russian army, and a clinic for children with spinal diseases during the communist era. After the Velvet Revolution in the 1980s, the city of Brno took ownership of the villa. It was designated as a UNESCO world heritage site in 2001 and fully restored to its original state in 2012, resembling the way the Tugendhats left it.
Mies van der Rohe, too, left Europe in the late 1930s to teach in the United States. There, he continued to refine the concept of minimal Modernism, which emphasized spaciousness without confinement, and it became one of the defining architectural themes of the following century. Visitors to Villa Tugendhat can witness the birth of this influential movement.
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