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I have recently just finished reading ‘The Glass Room’ by Simon Mawer, a novel loosely based on Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic. The book follows the fictional family of the Laudauers, a successful Jewish car manufacturer and his Aryan wife Liesel, from their honeymoon in Venice in 1929 to the early 1990s. They commission architect Rainer von Abt to design the modernist Laudauer House, on a hillside near a provincial Czech town. Referencing Adolf Loos’s famous dicta that ‘ornament is crime’, the building embraces modern living with the ‘Glass Room’, ‘der Glasraum’, alongside rich onyx walls and bespoke furniture. But the family are soon ousted from their masterpiece by Nazi troops, the building slipping from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet, but always having a gravitational pull to its owners.
The real building, Villa Tugendhat was commissioned by Fritz Tugendhat (1895-1958) and his wife Grete (1903-1970), who both came from Jewish German families of industrialists and traders who had lived in Brno for several generations. Grete was the one primarily interested in living in a modernist home, saying, “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.” Mies van der Rohe was employed in 1929, designing a free standing three-storey Villa, with an open interior, harmonised by a rich palette of materials. The Tugendhats said at the time, “He consequently explained the importance of utilising noble materials in Modernist structures, in particular, which do not contain decorations or ornamentation, this having been a neglected idea up until then by even, for example, Le Corbusier.” The centre piece, the Onyx wall, honey-coloured and marbled yellow, was mined from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco in North Africa.
I have never actually been to Villa Tugendhat, but it is definitely on my list next. I certainly enjoyed the book- the description of the interior spaces and how they effected each of the characters- even Liesel when she is old and blind can recognise the Glass Room, the Glass Volume or der Glasraum.
Grete Tugendhat Fritz Tugendhat
Also don’t miss a small exhibition on Villa Tugendhat at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place. Don’t expect much from the exhibition, but it is interesting nevertheless to see the black and white photographs of the Villa. Find details here.
