Villa Tugendhat

There will be another film screening in Villa Tugendhat on Wednesday 26^th September 2012. This time, audience members have the opportunity to enjoy the film classic Casablanca from the year 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz.

The film Casablanca takes place during World War II in the North African city of the same name. The film is not only romantic, but also full of the drama of the war era. It received a number of international awards, including the Oscar for best director and screenplay and another 5 nominations.

There will be two screenings in Villa Tugendhat: an evening showing at 8 pm and a later one at 10 pm.
The capacity for one screening is limited to 30 people.

Capacity filled!

Tickets can be reserved by email: info@tugendhat.eu or by telephone at the number: +420 515 511 015, they can also be purchased at the cash desk of Villa Tugendhat during the opening hours.

From the New York Times

Design

Reopening a Mies Modernist Landmark

By ALICE RAWSTHORN Published: February 24, 2012

LONDON — What would you do if the very grand, rather imperious architect who had designed your house invited himself for a visit? Doubtless, you would want the house to look its best, especially if its design was so radical that it had caused a critical storm.

Even so, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat’s response to the news that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was coming to Villa Tugendhat, the house he had built for them and their three children in the Czech city of Brno during the late 1920s, was rather extreme. They were so worried that he would object to the presence of Grete’s shabby old piano in the room he had furnished for the children’s nanny that they decided to hide it in the basement. Thankfully there was no need, because the visit was canceled.

Luckily for Mies, his detractors knew nothing of the piano saga. The gist of their criticism was that his design was undeniably beautiful, but too imposing to live in, at least, not comfortably. “Can one live in Villa Tugendhat?” was the title of a 1931 essay in Die Form magazine. The Tugendhats argued that one could, but they were wonderfully accommodating clients who had told Mies precisely what they needed from their home, then given him carte blanche and a seemingly limitless budget to build it.

The result is among Mies’s finest works and was hailed as a new model of 20th-century living, at least for those who were as sophisticated and privileged as the Tugendhats, both of whom came from wealthy Jewish industrial families. They moved into the house in 1930, but abandoned it eight years later to flee Czechoslovakia before the threatened Nazi invasion. Villa Tugendhat has now been restored, and is to open to the public on March 6, when visitors will discover that, innovative though it is in style and structure, the house is deeply traditional in other respects.

“Mies took radical decisions about how to design a new kind of living space, and the house is incredibly spacious, incredibly luxurious and incredibly sensual,” said Barry Bergdoll, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “But the Tugendhats had very specific notions about how they wanted to live. If you look at the program, it is almost like a 19th-century description of an English country house with a room for the butler to iron the morning newspaper. The space seems open and flowing, but there are large zones of privacy for the behind-the-scenes world of the servants.”

Villa Tugendhat is a product of what Mr. Bergdoll calls “the miracle period” of Mies’s prewar career in late 1920s Germany when it was one of a series of commissions he undertook, together with the Barcelona Pavilion or, as it was officially called, the German Pavilion at the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona. Grete Tugendhat had visited one of his houses when living in Germany with her first husband. After her divorce, she married Fritz Tugendhat, and they invited Mies, then in his early 40s, to design their home on a site with magnificent views of medieval Brno.

The result was a steel-framed structure in which Mies addressed his clients’ desire for privacy by locating their bedrooms on the upper floor, and most of the services, including Fritz’s photographic studio, on the lower floor. Between those floors is the public space, a sumptuous open-plan room looking out over the garden and across the fields to Brno through an immense glass wall. It is divided into different areas by velvet curtains and an onyx-clad screen, whose colors change with the light throughout the day.

Working with the interior designer Lilly Reich, Mies specified all of the furniture and furnishings in opulent woods, stones, velvets, silks and leathers. A new chair, the Brno, was designed especially for the house, with white sheepskin upholstery and a flat steel base. Mies insisted that there should only be one work of art in the living space, a 1913 sculpture of a woman’s torso by the German artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

The contrast of the glass-and-steel structure with its opulent interior and the natural beauty of its surroundings became a template for modern luxury. The Tugendhats loved living there. Grete Tugendhat said that she had “longed for a modern and spacious house with clear, simple shapes,” and insisted that they found Mies’s design “liberating” and the vast glass room to have “a very particular tranquillity.” The family left the house intact when they fled Brno in 1938, a year after Mies’s departure for the United States, where he designed such postwar architectural landmarks as the Seagram Building in New York and the Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois.

Villa Tugendhat was ransacked during World War II, first by the German Army and then by a Soviet cavalry regiment, which stabled its horses there. Mies and Reich’s exquisite rooms were in ruins, and their furniture burned as firewood. After the war, the house was used as a dance school and a rehabilitation center for a nearby children’s hospital, before being renovated, albeit clumsily, in the 1980s.

Even so, Villa Tugendhat still had a special status. The declaration for the dissolution of Czechoslovakia and the creation of the Czech Republic was signed there in 1992. The British novelist Simon Mawer was so intrigued by the house that he chose it as the setting for his 2009 novel “The Glass Room.” “It seemed so emblematic of the Czechoslovakia of the interwar period — a place of progressive ideas, of culture, of light and openness — and the dreadful double disaster of Nazism followed by Soviet Communism,” he said. “The appeal for a novelist was obvious. I’m surprised no one else had had the idea before.”

When Unesco designated Villa Tugendhat as a World Heritage site in 2001, the plans for the latest restoration began. And Grete Tugendhat’s “modern and spacious house with clear, simple shapes” is now very much as Mies envisaged it.

From Architecture Daily :

A Historical Masterpiece reopens to the Public: Villa Tugendhat / Mies van der Rohe

06 Mar 2012 - By Karissa Rosenfield

Today, one of the leading exemplars of classic Modern architecture reopens after a two year hiatus. The freshly renovated Villa Tugendhat underwent a monumental restoration and rehabilitation, starting in January 2010, with the aim of preserving and conserving the original building substance and layout, including the construction details, materials and technical system. Renewal work also included the lavish interiors and lush garden.

Built in Czechoslovakia in 1930, the Tugendhat Villa is seen as one of the most important residential buildings of the 20th century. The luxurious home was originally built for the Tugendhat family whom described the design as “liberating”. The steel-and-glass home feature an open plan, simple forms and large walls of glass that directly connected the interior with the gardens outside. Mies worked with interior designer Lilly Reich and specified all of the furnishings with lavish materials of various woods, stones, velvets, silks and leathers.

Shortly after the Tugendhat family fled Czechoslovakia in 1938, prior to the Munich Agreement, the Villa was confiscated by the Gestapo and became property of the German Reich (1942). The villa was nearly destroyed as the windows were blown out and the furniture was either stolen or used as firewood.

After the war, the Villa was used as a dance school (1945-1950) and then a rehabilitation center for a nearby children’s hospital (1950-1979). In 1994, it was first opened to the public as a museum and in 2001, it was deemed a World Heritage site .

The Villa has now been precisely restored to its original substance. An international committee of experts, known as the THICOM (Tugendhat House International Committee), advised the City of Brno throughout the entire process to ensure proper preservation and restoration.

AD Classics: Villa Tugendhat / Mies van der Rohe

The Villa Tugendhat was commissioned by the wealthy newlyweds Grete & Fritz Tugendhat, a Jewish couple with family money from textile manufacturing companies in Brno. The couple met Mies van der Rohe in Berlin in 1927, and was already impressed by his design for the Zehlendorf house of Edward Fuchs. As fans of spacious homes with simple forms, Mies’ free plan method was perfect for the Tugendhats’ taste; however, he was not their only interest in an architect for their own home. They originally confronted Brno’s foremost modern architect at the time, Arnost Wiesner, but after visiting various projects by each architect, the Tugendhats ultimately went with Mies.

Mies visited the site in September of 1928, and had already produced plans by December of that same year. He shared his design with the Tugendhat family that new year’s eve, and with a few minor changes new plans were drafted and set into motion. Mies deployed his new functionalist concept of iron framework, doing away with load-bearing interior walls and allowing for more open and light spaces. The villa was composed of three levels (including the basement), with different floor plans and forms, each relating differently to the sloping site. The Southeast and garden facades were completely glazing from floor to ceiling. The villa Tugendhat was a rather large house, complete with two children’s bedrooms and nanny’s quarters that shared a bathroom at the front of the house, while the master bed and bath were at the rear and connected to the terrace. A housekeeper’s flat and staff quarters were also included in the design.

The villa was exceptionally expensive for its time considering the lavish materials, abnormal construction methods, and extraordinary new technologies of heating and cooling. The house was very advanced for a private residence, and while the overall cost was never known, estimates fall somewhere near five million Czech crowns. In 1930, that amount could have built at least 30 small family homes. Brno was already a hub of modern Architecture for Czechoslovakia in the 1920s, and the Villa Tugendhat was only met with moderate praise at best among the avant garde in its time. Many of the left wing elite in the art world viewed the new home as snobbish and overdone because its lush interior design and furnishings.

Mies designed all the furniture in the house and chose precisely the placement of each piece and fixture. Although there was no art on the walls or decoration in or on the house, it never came across as bare or plain because of the rich materiality of onyx and rare tropical woods used throughout the home. The villa was built by building contractors in Brno, but the iron framework was constructed by contractors from Berlin. Steel frame construction was unusual for homes at that time, but brought with it many advantages that Mies was very occupied with and had already used in his famed Barcelona Pavilion – thinner walls, a free plan that could differ from floor to floor, large walls of glazing to open up rooms and connect them to the garden, etc. Over all the minimal and stable design became a hallmark in Mies’ residential accomplishments.

The Tugendhat family left Czechoslovakia for Venezuela in 1938 shortly before The Munich Agreement and never returned. The Nazi Gestapo set up flats and offices in the abandoned house during the World War II, when most of the windows were blown out during air raids and the original furniture was eventually all stolen. The villa was used in 1992 for the formal signing that separated the country into the present day Czech Republic and Slovakia, and since 1994 has been open to the public as a museum. Heirs of Fritz and Grete Tugendhat filed for the reinstitution of the villa into their ownership in 2007 on the basis of laws in place regarding works of art confiscated during the Holocaust. The villa Tugendhat is currently under a multi-million dollar reconstruction/restoration that is scheduled to be finished at the beginning of 2012.