ON A low hill in a quiet suburb of a provincial Czech city, one of Europe’s greatest 20th-century buildings has reopened its doors, offering a luminous glimpse of its creator’s vision for modern living and reflections on dark decades that nearly reduced it to ruin.
German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe dreamed up the shimmering three-storey villa for Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, a wealthy Jewish couple living in Brno in the 1920s, when it was the vibrant second city of newly formed Czechoslovakia.
Grete’s father gave her a plot of land overlooking the city as a wedding gift, and the couple commissioned Mies to build them a very special family home.
“I truly longed for a modern spacious house with clear and simple shapes. My husband was horrified by the idea of having rooms full of objects and cloths as he had known from childhood,” Grete recalled in later years, when explaining why she approached the daring designer.
“He had a calm, self-confident certainty which immediately served to convince you,” she said. “From the manner in which he spoke about his projects, we realised that we were dealing with a genuine artist.”
Mies was already well-known for a series of bold creations, ranging from luxury houses to office and apartment buildings, and he would go on to be the last director of Germany’s Bauhaus design school in the early 1930s before its closure and his emigration to the United States.
He accepted the Tugendhats’ commission in 1927, attracted not only by their ample budget and the fine views afforded by their plot, but by the free rein they gave him to express an architectural philosophy that celebrated space, light, simplicity and harmony – and modern technology’s ability to combine those in a functional and practical living space.
Mies built the house on an innovative steel skeleton that obviated the need for internal load-bearing walls, allowing the creation of a vast interior space that is flooded with light.
At the flick of a switch, motors whir and the huge windows slide down to floor level, blending the interior with the terrace outside and the tree-filled garden beyond, which slopes down towards old Brno’s skyline of red-tiled roofs and slender spires.
Mies filled the villa with innovations – hidden as discretely as one would expect by the man who popularised the aphorism “less is more” – and the Tugendhats found that they all worked perfectly, from a sophisticated air-conditioning system to a main door controlled by light sensors.
Local builders completed the villa in 14 months, and the Tugendhats and their three children took up residence in December 1930.
They said it was a wonderful family home, in which the austerity that could result from such extensive use of pale stone, glass and chrome was offset by Mies’s incorporation of natural materials that brought warmth and colour to the interior and linked it with the garden outside.
Alongside specially designed furniture, partitions and shelves of expensive rosewood, zebra-wood and ebony, Mies installed a wall of Moroccan onyx that the shifting light would change from honey-gold to pink with streaks of red, surpassing even his own high expectations of its beauty.
“When it was sufficiently demonstrated that the stone was transparent and that certain veins on the back side shone red when lit up from the front by the sunset, it was a joyous surprise for even him,” Grete recalled.
The onyx wall and the rest of Villa Tugendhat inspired Simon Mawer’s novel The Glass Room, which was shortlisted for Britain’s Man Booker Prize in 2009.
The owners of Mawer’s “Landauer House” throw a house-warming party, and guests “crowd into the space of the Glass Room like passengers on the observation deck of a luxury liner”.
Though some gaze out “through the windows onto the pitching surface of the city . . . almost all are ignorant of the cold outside and the gathering storm clouds, the first sign of the tempest that is coming”.
The storm sweeping in from Nazi Germany forced the Tugendhats to flee their villa just eight years after they moved in.
They sought refuge in Switzerland and then moved to Venezuela, as first the Gestapo and then the Messerschmitt aircraft design bureau occupied Mies’s masterpiece.
When the Soviets drove out the Germans, the Red Army kept horses in the villa’s vast main room. Horse dung and glass from the bomb-shattered windows covered the once milk-white floor, and much of the furniture was used for firewood.
In communist Czechoslovakia, the villa served as a dance school and physiotherapy clinic before finally being declared a national monument.
Two years ago, this Unesco world heritage site was closed and finally given a full restoration, at a cost of almost €7 million.
Reopened to the world, the Villa Tugendhat is once more the “palace of light” described in Mawer’s novel. It is a great architect’s bright dream of modern life, edged by the darkness that engulfed one family, their home, their young country and the continent.
