From the outside, it looks like an ordinary home in a quiet Czech neighborhood. Tourists often walk past it, expecting a grand classical villa. But Villa Tugendhat in Brno is a globally significant site studied by architects and historians alike.
It has been a private residence, a dance studio, a recovery center for women with osteological conditions, a property owned by the Nazi Germany and the location for a major 20th century historical event, reports CNN.
Built in the 1920s for the Tugendhats, a wealthy German Jewish family, the house was designed by Mies van der Rohe, the architect famous for the phrase “less is more.” Completed in 1930, just before Hitler’s rise to power, the villa was intentionally designed to blend in with its surroundings.
To appreciate its architectural innovation, one must view the villa from the back. Built atop a hill, it features floor-to-ceiling glass windows offering sweeping views of the landscape. “(Van der Rohe) was, despite his very bourgeois appearance, a radical thinker,” says Dietrich Neumann of Brown University. “He radically rethought the way people might want to live.”
At a time when homes were divided into small, functional rooms, Villa Tugendhat embraced open, flowing spaces, constructed with rare materials like white onyx. “You just flow between the rooms, and that was very antithetical to the German idea that you had to have closed cozy spaces inside,” says Michael Lambek.
Lambek’s mother, Hanna, was the only child of Grete Tugendhat’s first marriage and lived in the villa. In his 2022 book Behind the Glass: The Villa Tugendhat and Its Family, Lambek wrote, “There was nothing left to chance.”
He explained, “The house does not rest on its walls. It rests on steel pillars that have chrome wrapped around them. And the walls, at least on one side of the house, were replaced by windows. It was the first house to have plate glass, wall-to-wall, or ceiling-to-floor windows.”
Van der Rohe and his collaborator Lilly Reich designed custom furniture for the villa. Two of their creations, the Brno and Tugendhat chairs, are still in production today.
The interiors remained minimalist, forgoing family portraits and ornate decor. “There was no inherited furniture from the parents,” Neumann says. “There were no paintings on the walls. There were no Persian rugs... There’s almost no belongings that are there to show off your personal history or your sentimental memories.”
Used as a home for only a short time, the villa was seized by Nazi Germany during WWII after the family fled to Venezuela amid rising antisemitism. Later, it changed hands multiple times until the Tugendhats returned to Brno in the 1960s.
After the war, the Tugendhats settled in Switzerland and Czechoslovakia fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. Grete Tugendhat was able to visit the villa again during the brief break from Soviet control during the Prague Spring, before it was crushed in August 1968 when the Soviet Union and its allies invaded.
Grete Tugendhat agreed to give up her ownership claim to the home under two conditions: it be restored to its original condition, and it be open to the public. The city of Brno said yes.
Restoration was slow, but the villa gained historical significance again in 1992 when Czech and Slovak leaders Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar met there to agree on the peaceful split of Czechoslovakia—the Velvet Divorce.
In 2001, UNESCO designated Villa Tugendhat a World Heritage Site, calling it “a pioneering work of modern 20th century residential architecture.”
Bd-pratidin English/FNC
