Villa Tugendhat, Brno, 1928-30
house of the 20th century



by Prof. Siona Shimsi Photos: Yachin Hirsch During WWII, thousands of private homes were confiscated by the authorities in Europe, and handed over as loot to the Nazi conquerors and their collaborators. Ironically, this is precisely what very often saved them from destruction. Conversely, in countries where the communists took over the Nazi rule, many homes were looted, damaged and destroyed.

Villa Tugendhat, called at its building ?the most beautiful home in the world? and declared World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2001, is a fine example.



Planned by Ludvig Mies van der Rohe in the years 1928-1930, Villa Tugendhat is one of the buildings to have expressed all the events, innovations and failures characterizing 20th century architecture. The private home, planned with the belief in ideal formalism, was an expression of conceit, a bastion of hatred and avarice, the subject of court battles to return pillaged property, and neglectful preservation.



Brno of the 1920s was an open democratic city administrated by a young progressive town hall. Public building flourished in the baroque style that advocated form as expressing necessity, but not without embellishment. The hundreds of houses built then by local architects blend in well with the clean baroque style prevalent in the city today. At the time of its building, Villa Tugendhat was considered a foreign object evoking debates and questions such as: ?Can this be lived in at all??

The villa owners, Greta and Fritz, obtained their wealth from Greta?s parents, the Lw Beer family - wealthy Jews with world-wide business, who contributed greatly to advancing Czechoslovakia in general, and Brno in particular, employing hundreds of its residents.

Before marrying Fritz in 1928, Greta lived for a number of years in Germany, where she became familiar with the new arts flourishing there, and was captivated by the architecture of Mies van der Rohe.

The meeting with Mies to plan their home took place precisely while he was being appointed to plan the German pavilion in the Barcelona World Fair. Hence, the stylistic similarity between the two buildings has caused people to assume that the couple?s invitation of the architect followed upon their visit to the Fair. Greta, who had documented their first meeting, fought this misconception to her dying day, proving in articles she wrote that the planning of the home, with all its technological innovations, had ended before Mies submitted his plans for the German pavilion. Ironically, this tiny pavilion was dissembled after the fair and sold as scrap, since the German government didn?t jump up to acquire it. In 1983 the pavilion was reconstructed by the Barcelona municipality, and has become a pilgrimage site.

Despairing at the time of becoming one of the Third Reich?s top architects, Mies took the first opportunity to build a home for a generous client who accepted all his innovative ideas, including those the Brno architects had warned against. In hindsight it turned out Mies had been right, and the building, at enormous cost, was completed within a year.

The villa stands on the upper side of grand gardens, designed in the spirit of the wealthy family. However, the minimalist fa?ade to the street does not reveal the home?s complexity - a role left to the fa?ades facing the garden through a large glass window, which travels to and from the depths of the basement by the pressing of a button. Steel columns enveloped by stainless steel accommodate large openings, in the minimalist innovative spirit that Mies had applied in the workers? estate in Wiessenhof, Stuttgart. Considering the local terra-cotta bricks old-fashion, Mies preferred to clad the building with white plaster especially composed for him.

The interior and furniture were designed by Lilly Reich (1885-1947), Mies? loyal and deprived partner, who only in recent years has won international acclaim thanks to the furniture company producing her brand. Expensive finishing materials were brought from around the world for the villa: ebony (considered the most expensive wood), onyx for the drawing-room wall, large travertine tiles for the floors, linoleum that could withstand the sun, and velvet cloth specially woven for the villa.

The ?wild? landscape was meticulously planned by landscape architect Grete Roeder, who also took part in the garden reconstruction decades later, according to the original plans she had retained. At the center of the garden stood a weeping willow, hundreds of years old, around which the family would often convene.

Villa Tugendhat brought Mies world acclaim, and was the reason Philip Johnson brought him to America in 1938, getting him to head the Chicago School of Architecture, which in turn launched his brilliant career in America, placing him as one of the five leading architects of the 20th century.

Mies re-established contact with Germany only three decades later. His partner, Lilly Reich, continued to run his affairs from her Berlin office until it was bombed in 1943 and she was sent to a forced work camp. She had hidden thousands of Mies?s sketches in the country, so they were saved and later displayed as part of the Mies collection at the MOMA, New-York.

Mies did not reward his partner, nor did he encourage her to remain in America when she visited him after he had been there a year. At the height of his career, when the world hung on his every word (with his slow poor English), Mies was known rather for his barbing remarks to his bread-providers. In Europe these were mainly Jews, whom he treated as a necessary evil. He did not recall that the Tugendhats had been his ultimate jumping board - the ideal client generously agreeing to realize all the details of his avant-garde plan, including living with the only art work he placed in the plans - a torso of a striding girl, by sculptor Wilhelm Lambrok, 1904.

The Tugendhat family moved into the villa in 1930, with a work staff that lived in specially planned rooms. They managed to live in their dream house only seven and a half years before their Jewishness dictated the course of their lives and, as result - that of their villa. Unlike many others in Czechoslovakia, including their near kin, they foresaw the meaning of the Nazis? takeover of the country following the Munich Agreement, and left Brno for Switzerland in 1938, and from there to Caracas, Venezuela in 1941.

Their family, however, were not saved. Fritz?s parents and sisters were killed in a concentration camp, and Greta?s father was murdered when he tried to escape. Their driver and his wife remained in the villa, adapting to the Nazi reality, and acquiescing to the ?distribution? of all that was left to the city inhabitants, except the furniture taken by the family.

A year later the villa was declared Third Reich property. SS troopers were barracked at the villa and the family palace, and later on so was the Messer-Schmidt planning office. In 1945 the Red Army turned the villa into a public kitchen. Cooking installations were set up against the lavish onyx, and other rooms served as horse stalls. The next phase saw a dancing and gymnastics academy in the house, and from 1950 - a children?s hospital. In 1962 the building was officially registered as property of the Czech Health Ministry, and a year later - thanks to the intervention of the Architects? Association - as property of the Ministry of Monuments.

In 1950, the Tugendhat family returned with their four children to Switzerland, but refrained from going back to Brno. In 1967 Greta visited her house accompanied by an architect from Mies?s New-York office, with the intention of renovating it. But Mies?s death in 1969 stopped the plan from materializing. At the same time Greta was sparing no efforts to locate Lambrok?s sculpture, which was lost and its very existence denied.

With the Soviet invasion to Czechoslovakia in 1968, the abuse of the building reached new heights. Makeshift partitions were erected to ?better divide the area?, and part of the glass was replaced with plastic boards of varying dimensions. In light of the ongoing disgrace to the building, the Czech media got up in arms in its favor. As a result, it was decided to transfer the hospital to another building, although it took 10 years for that to happen.

In 1969 a symposium took place in Brno devoted to the villa and its planned renovation. Greta and her family were guests of honor, and guests from many countries enthusiastically supported the idea. In fact, however, the only thing to be renovated was the garden, under the supervision of the landscape architect of the villa, Grete Roeder, as mentioned before - according to the original plans she had saved. The willow tree had been burnt down, in 1943, in the only air-raid on Brno.

In the 1980s, with the growing awareness in the world for preservation, there were a number of attempts to renovate the villa. This was done in the spirit of the times, and the villa was now converted into a guest-home for governmental functionaries, as yet closed to the public.

With the collapse of the Soviet rule in 1989, the villa was placed under the charge of the Brno Museum, and the municipality declared its intention to return it to its rightful owners - the children of Fritz and Greta, who announced their intention of restoring the villa with donations, and opening it to the public.

Hence the Tugendhat Fund was established in 1993, to renovate the villa and restore it to its former glory. A year later the villa was opened to the public, but was still inhabited by a beauty salon. In August 1992 the disgraced villa was chosen to house the signing of the agreement for the division of Czechoslovakia into two separate entities - the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Following pressure of international professional bodies, the Brno municipality announced a competition for ?renovating? the house. However, the group of architects that won the competition failed the mission as they could not trace building materials similar to the original ones. Following this failure, the municipality decided to return the villa to its inheritors, together with the Lambrok sculpture that was suddenly ?discovered?, but not without a demand of an imaginary fee as a ?gift tax?, embedded in the local regulations.

The inheritors had no way of paying the tax on their own, and put the sculpture up for auction at Sotheby?s, London (the buyer and the sum remain undisclosed). The response of the Brno municipality was to accuse them of betraying the Czech cultural assets (Wilhelm Lambrok was a German sculptor), and the villa was nationalized.

In 1997, in London, an international group of architects organized to renovate the villa. Their contribution was a precise documentation portfolio accompanied by drawings of every item and piece of furniture in the original villa. The UNESCO announcement in 2001 of the villa (despite its desolate state) as a ?work of art? and as ?the most important residential building in Europe since the 1930s? enabled the family to revive their claim for ownership over the house, thanks to the clauses concerning works of art, as determined in the 1970s special international agreement.

In 2006 the villa served as a film site for the movie ?Hannibal Awakens? - as the home of the monstrosity who returns to it after having disappeared for years. There was no lack of anti-Semitic innuendos to the interpretations given the choice.

In 2007, the three surviving inheritors - Ernest Tugendhat, Ruth Guggenheim, and Daniela Hammer, presented their claim to the villa. They intend to establish a world fund to aid in restoring the villa to its original state, and defining it as a site for studying the architecture of Brno.

The Brno municipality opposes the very definition of the house as a work of art, for fear of precedence. The legal confrontation is far from over.