Villa Tugendhat is a three-storey villa in the Brno district of Černá Pole, designed in 1929–1930 by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for the spouses Grete and Fritz Tugendhat.
Villa Tugendhat is a free-standing three-storey villa in Brno, built for Grete and Fritz Tugendhat to a design by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 1929–1930. It stands on sloping ground in the Černá Pole district and faces south-west.[1][2]
Location and surroundings
Modern Brno came into being from the 1830s, when the town walls began to be pulled down. The city grew quickly, and because the industrial metropolis of Moravia was nicknamed the Austrian Manchester owing to the predominance of textile production, urbanisation moved further from the centre. Working-class suburbs and residential districts arose.[1]
The first villa colony in Brno was founded in 1860 on the vine-planted slopes above Lužánky park. The oldest was the Kaiser villa of 1860 on Černopolní ulice. According to the operator's website, it was followed in 1862 by the villa of the builder Josef Arnold and, almost at the same time, the neighbouring villa of the Brno lawyer and mayor Karl Giskra. In the period before the First World War and until the end of the 1930s, Černá Pole became, thanks to individual and cooperative building, one of the most prestigious residential districts of Brno.[1]
Arnold's villa was acquired in 1909 by Cecílie Hože, sister of Grete's father Alfred Löw-Beer. In October 1939 the Gestapo seized the property; after the war it was owned by the state, and from 1952 to 2012 it housed a nursery school. Today it is owned by the city of Brno.[1]
The architect and the history of the building
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe lived in the United States from 1938 and, according to the operator, fundamentally influenced the development of American architecture of the 20th century. The villa in Brno is today the most authentically preserved of Mies's works on the European continent.[2]
Specialist articles by the operator compare the villa with the German Pavilion in Barcelona. Both buildings were created between 1928 and 1930 at opposite ends of Europe and were among Mies's most important works before his departure for the United States in 1938.[2]
Restoration
In 2001 a building-historical survey of the house was produced, prepared to an above-standard level because of the exceptional importance of the building. It also includes an assessment of the villa in the context of world modern architecture and from the viewpoint of heritage conservation, with emphasis on its exceptional authenticity.[2]
Design work on the restoration began in early 2005. The project for the rehabilitation and restoration of the villa was prepared from January 2005 to September 2006 by a group of three architectural studios: OMNIA projekt, ARCHTEAM and RAW.[2]
In 2010–2012 the villa underwent heritage restoration. The building and the adjoining garden were returned to the form they had when completed in 1930, and the interiors are furnished with exact replicas of the original furniture.[1]
What can be seen
In the basement the villa's technical spaces were restored: the ventilation system, the boiler room, the machine room for the lowering windows and the moth-proof chamber. According to the operator's website, they are accessible as part of the extended visitor route. In the same place is an exhibition about the architect, the clients and the life of the family in the villa until 1938, when the Tugendhats emigrated in the face of the threat of the Second World War.[1]
The Löw-Beer family
Members of the Löw-Beer and Tugendhat families occupied several properties in the area from the beginning of the 20th century.[1] In 1935 Grete's cousin Ernst Löw-Beer had a family house built in the Brno district of Pisárky, on Kalvodova ulice, to a design by the Viennese architects Rudolf Baumfeld and Norbert Schlesinger. In Svitávka near Brno, the Large Villa of the firm Moses Löw-Beer was built in 1900–1902, and in 1906 Grete's father Alfred Löw-Beer had the Small Villa built to a design by the Brno builder Josef Nebehosteny.[2]