Villa Tugendhat - Brno, Czech Republic - Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich - Completed: 1930
12 Photographs
My habit of returning from European ice hockey tournaments via unconventional routes found me stalking up a snow-covered Czech hill one brisk March morning brandishing a sheepish grin and a printed ticket. I hadn’t seen many images of the Villa Tugendhat before but felt I knew it having recently read the fictionalised story of the house in Simon Mawer’s book The Glass Room. The book itself was famously disliked by the descendants of the Tugendahts, but it brought to my attention one of the late European buildings of one of the great modernist masters. I’d seen a number of Mies’ buildings in North America a few years before, but this felt like something different, smaller, less machine-like, no less refined, but in a different way. I was excited.
I really love the moments on an architectural adventure, just before a house or building comes into view, when you know it’s coming. I can clearly see the steep street in my mind, a tall building masking the view as I approached, before the wide side garden opens up, revealing a beautiful white house, settled in the snow, looking out across a rolling town also blanketed in snow. A perfectly white, beautifully clear and simple work of remarkable clarity, deeply modernist, inside and out.
I liked this house much more than I expected. It is opulence at its most austere, managing a kind of warmth that surprised me. The sun-filled rooms and plant-filled glasshouse certainly contribute to this, but it’s definitely more than that. The clean white of the material palette is balanced by the richness of the materials used in the detail; the rosewood, the travertine, the onyx, and the bronze.
The construction nerd in me was delighted at how technically brilliant and innovative the house was for its time, utilising window heaters to eliminate condensation, as well as 4 gigantic 3.1m x 4.8m windows which mechanically dropped into the floor to open the whole front of the living spaces to the garden.
Remarkable.
HWLK