Villa Tugendhat

In Brno Mies van der Rohe built a house whose living area is a single open room with a wall of onyx and a semicircular wall of Macassar wood. The large panes can be lowered into the floor. The house is functionalist luxury in its finest form.

Grete and Fritz Tugendhat, a young couple from wealthy textile families, received the plot as a wedding gift and in 1928 engaged Mies van der Rohe. The house was built in 1928–1930, at the same time as Mies was designing the Barcelona Pavilion. He worked with Lilly Reich on the interiors. In 1938 the family fled from the Nazis and never returned to live in the house.

The house stands on a slope. From the street you see only the low upper floor with the entrance and the bedrooms. Below opens the living floor, a single room of about 280 square metres, carried by cruciform steel columns clad in chrome-plated metal. A free-standing wall of onyx from Morocco and a semicircular wall of Macassar ebony divide the space. Facing the park are large glass panes that can be lowered electrically. Mies and Reich designed the furniture, among it the Tugendhat chair and the Brno chair. The house also had advanced technology for heating and ventilation.

During the war the house was used by the German state and then by Soviet soldiers, who damaged it. After the war it became a dance school and a physiotherapy centre for children. The agreement on the division of Czechoslovakia was signed here in 1992. The house became a World Heritage Site in 2001 and was restored in 2010–2012, after which it opened as a museum. Villa Tugendhat shows how modernism’s open plan could be combined with luxurious materials and great care for detail.