On the way from Cedar Rapids to Chicago, we stopped at Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House, one of two houses that Mies, who is generally acknowledged as one of the best architects of the 20th century, designed in his life. The Farnsworth House property is now open to the public under the guardianship of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
That stop in the Illinois countryside was intended to be the first of a two-part series in late 2021. Three months after that, we were supposed to have visited Mies' second (but earlier) house in Brno, Czechia, the incomparable (or so I assumed) Villa Tugendhat designed for the Tugendhat family between the two World Wars and which is also now open to the public for tours. We didn't go in 2021. COVID pushed our plans a year. But last December we did make it to Brno to complete our Mies doubleheader. Sometimes life makes you wait for the good stuff.
In my post about the Farnsworth House that I wrote about 18 months ago, I started with an account of the emotions of visiting a famous building that I'd admired for a long time and then went on to decry Mies' place in the canon of the greats of modern architecture. I'm going to do no such thing this time for two reasons: (1) I've already covered the emotional part and suffice it to say there was no less excitement or anticipation on our approach to the Villa Tugendhat than there was in Plano, IL in 2021; and (2) the Farnsworth House changed my opinion of Mies; I'm still not on board with him being at the very top of any sorts of lists out there but he has my respect.
The Farnsworth House put me in a very different state of mind for my visit to the Villa Tugendhat. I was very much looking forward to this one.
We actually got lucky with our trip to Villa Tugendhat.
When we finalized (before ultimately postponing) our trip to Vienna in 2021, Villa Tugendhat was one of the first agenda items I added to our itinerary even though it was in a completely different country than Vienna and it was historically off limits behind the Iron Curtain, the very real barrier set up by the Soviet Union after World War II to cut off eastern Europe from the rest of the world. The Iron Curtain turned out to be no barrier in 2022, as I suspect it would have been a similar non-barrier a year earlier. Brno is extremely accessible by train at about an hour's ride from Vienna's Hauptbanhof and the public transportation infrastructure within Brno itself was extremely easy and convenient to use.
But we definitely benefitted from the year's postponement in one very significant way. When we were finalizing the schedule for our trip in 2021, I hemmed and hawed so much with the date that when we nailed down our plans to get to Brno, all the English language tour slots of the Villa were sold out for the duration of our time in Vienna. A year later, I planned better and grabbed a slot as soon as tours for the month of December were added to the calendar. If we hadn't had to postpone the trip by a year, we wouldn't have visited the Villa Tugendhat at all.
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| Details: door handle, light switches, door stop. |
When I committed to writing this post about the Villa Tugendhat, I considered consciously NOT writing a comparison piece between the two Mies-designed houses. It turned out to be virtually impossible to approach this post that way. We are dealing with two houses designed by the same world-famous architect for two wealthy patrons. There is no doubt that the average client would struggle to afford these luxury residences that were created deliberately for their owners as non-traditional living spaces.
Beyond that though, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the two buildings were extremely different. One was a weekend house that slept one in the middle of the country in the United States. The other was a primary residence for a family with two kids, a nanny and a houseful of servants in a city that was destined to be invaded and then freed and then kept hostage by its liberators in and around one of the worst events in human history. The design intent and siting and historical context are night and day.
They were also both very different commissions for the architect involved. The Farnsworth House was very much a side project for Mies (and maybe also for Edith Farnsworth) which he dabbled in while hoping he would have ultimate control over every detail (he didn't!). The commission involved a lot of fighting, a lot of dishonesty (particularly about the construction cost) and ultimately at least one lawsuit from both sides.
Not so with the Villa Tugendhat. The house was a wedding gift from Greta Tugendhat's parents who (it appears from walking through the house) spared no expense. Mies operated without restraint on this one, procuring the most luxurious materials from wherever he wanted. Sure, there were some attempts by Fritz Tugendhat to influence the design (notably the full height doors that Mies insisted on) but those objections soon disappeared when Mies threatened to walk. What is with these architects?
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| Bathroom (above) and bathroom detail (below). |
Edith Farnsworth lived in her Mies van der Rohe-designed weekend house on and off for a little more than 20 years before she sold the place and moved to Italy full time in 1982. The Tugendhats lasted eight years after their house was finished in 1930. They didn't sell. They didn't find a responsible owner to take care of what they had created. They didn't take anything inside the house when they left. They fled. For their lives.
Both Fritz and Greta Tugendhat were Jewish. Admittedly non-practicing but they didn't figure (and they were probably correct) that a detail like that would amount to much in the eyes of the Nazis who took control of the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia after the signature of the Munich Agreement in September 1938. They fled to Switzerland and then to Venezuela, abandoning their lives and their property and all connection they had to their pasts. They were probably, all things considered, very lucky they could do that, even as horrific as it might have been to have to leave everything behind and just go. Certainly, Josef and Josefine Eckstein were not as lucky, as we found out when we visited the Beethoven Pasqualithaus museum later in the week.
I think it would be crass to lament the fate of an architectural icon like the Villa Tugendhat following the departure of its owners, particularly considering what the house looks like today, which is very much a fully restored masterpiece. I've certainly been in famous houses that would struggle to live up to the Villa's current condition. So I won't do any lamenting here. But after the Tugendhats left Czechoslovakia, the place did have a bit of a patchwork history.
When the Nazis finally occupied Brno in a semi-permanent way, they moved into the Villa. Later, they turned it over to the Messerschmitt company (the one that made airplanes for the Nazis) where Willy Messerschmitt himself actually lived (Messerschmitt probably saved one of the house's marquee design elements but we'll get to that...). When the Red Army rid Brno of the Nazis, they used the Villa for soldiers' housing. The soldiers quartered there used the Tugendhat's furniture as firewood.
After the war, the house became some things different entirely than the place was intended to be, including a children's physiotherapy center and a dance studio. Ultimately, it survived intact until 1993 when the Friends of the Tugendhat House (which included as a member one Greta Tugendhat) was formed. They made sure they got involved in preserving the house as a museum, which of course it still is to this date.
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| Garage (top) and entrance hall with full height rosewood paneling (bottom). |
When we got out of our car at the Farnsworth House property in Illinois, we crossed over the Fox River and walked down a wooded path along that same river until the house revealed itself to us. We did no such thing at Villa Tugendhat. Take the bus from central Brno and you are in a neighborhood that looks like it was at one time made up entirely of very similar-looking nineteenth century houses. And most of them, in fact, are still there. Take a right at the end the road and the Villa Tugendhat is obviously there because it is obviously different from all the other houses in the neighborhood. It is clearly non-traditional and in many senses a lot more private that its neighbors. The Villa Tugendhat does not look out over the street it is sited on.
The house itself is upside down. Or maybe not, depending on your perspective. Maybe it's just slid down the hill a bit. You enter on the bedroom level and then go downstairs to the main living floor of the house. Maybe you just enter the house upside down. It's a little odd to go past bedrooms to get to someone's living room, I suppose.
The entrance level of the Villa Tugendhat is interesting but maybe nothing more than that. If there's anything to get excited about here it's the outside terrace that surrounds the bedroom level, with some bedrooms opening directly onto the patio that wraps the house and overlooks the garden and the city of Brno. The view is admittedly spectacular.
I know, I know...I totally just pooh-poohed one half of one of the most lauded Modern architecture residences ever built. It's my blog and that's how I felt.
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| The Villa Tugendhat master bedroom suite. Two rooms, of course. I mean, why would you sleep with your spouse? |
The good stuff is downstairs.
The living level (for lack of a better term here) of the Villa Tugendhat has to be one of the most famous and influential floors of a private residence ever to come out of the 20th century. There are no real rooms on the floor. Space is defined by a series of carefully placed walls and a grid of Mies' famous cruciform columns.
It totally works.
There are two main seating areas plus a library area and dining area in the main space of the living level. There is also a winter garden flanking one side of the floor. The winter garden and dining area are defined with fairly traditional methods of dividing space, namely a glazed wall and a curved, wood-clad partition. While they don't necessarily relate to the building structure in a traditional way, they nonetheless define space by imposing a barrier that you cannot walk through. It's straightforward and obvious as to what is going on.
The main seating areas are defined spatially by the chrome-clad, cruciform-shaped columns and the onyx wall that separates the window side of the space from the non-window side (or the side that is buried beneath the street where the main entrance to the property is). It is odd to think that the tiniest corner formed by these mirrored columns can actually define and confine space in any way but it does. These things actually do define corners on the spaces on either side of the wall, which for its part actually extends beyond the column grid. I'm telling you...it totally works.
You also get a sense of the amount of money poured into this residence. The main floor of the Villa Tugendhat is huge. It's about 2,800 square feet, which is almost 20% larger than the entire three-story townhouse that I live in. That's comparing one level of a house with no bedrooms or kitchen to my entire dwelling. It's enormous. The library shelves, relatively inconsequential in terms of the character of the spaces on the floor, are made from Macassar ebony wood, which is sourced from a single island in Indonesia.
But the costliest piece of the entire house is that onyx wall, which is a beige-yellow color at most times but apparently glows a fiery red-orange when the sunlight hits it just right. It came from closer than Indonesia. Mies found the stone in Morocco's Atlas Mountains. The reported price of the onyx was 250,000 Czech Crowns, which at the time the Villa Tugendhat was built was the cost of about five entire homes. One wall in one room cost five times the amount required to purchase a house in the surrounding area. Crazy, right?
After the Tugendhats left the house in 1938, there was a lot in the house that was pillaged and sold or burned so its transient residents could stay warm in the winter. But the onyx wall, which was worth far more than most men could earn in years of work or maybe even a whole lifetime stayed intact. We might have Willy Messerschmitt to thank for that. Seems Willy covered the wall in wood when he left town so that whoever found the house wouldn't be able to see how spectacular and spectacularly valuable that wall was. Turns out it worked. He may have made machines that destroyed a lot of Europe during World War II, but at least he saved a wall made out of stone in a house in Brno.
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| The very thin and very expensive onyx wall. |
Now as an architect I should have gushed the most about the way space is defined on the Villa Tugendhat's main floor. But I'm not going to. The main takeaway from the Villa Tugendhat for me and by far the best thing about the house is window wall and the view and the way that Mies frames that view from the main room.
So, no, I'm not giving the architect credit for the view. Not really. I mean, it's pretty obvious that it's there and it's pretty obvious that the house should be oriented so that you are looking at the view from pretty much anywhere in the house that it can be seen. But I do think you can still appreciate the way that the view is framed and how much the Villa Tugendhat pushed the limits of materials in the 1930s.
Check out the first picture below. How large is that pane of glass? I struggle to imagine another building either of this house's vintage or anywhere else for that matter with a piece of glazing that size. The view is framed by the floor, the ceiling and as few columns as possible. It's incredible. All the focus is where it should be. Namely...outside.
I know...that pesky horizontal railing gets in the way. BUT that was a later add-on to the house. Mies' original design didn't have any such rail to obscure (no matter how small a distraction it might have been) that amazing vista. The railing, by the way, was added not to prevent someone from walking into the glass, but to prevent someone out of the house itself if the window is open.
You read that right. That ginormous pane of glass opens. By retracting into the floor. This notion in and of itself seems ludicrous but it's true. Those windows open. Down. We didn't get to see them that way. We had no expectation that we would in mid-December. I don't know if they ever open these things for tours. Given the fragile nature of some of the contents of the Villa Tugendhat, I can't imagine they ever do. But the audacity to pull this off is just impressive.
That window wall and what it frames. Spectacular.
There are shades integral to the exterior wall system to block the sun also. I'd love to see those in action as much as I'd love to see those windows disappear into the floor.
Before we visited the Farnsworth House, I read Alex Beam's book, Broken Glass, detailing the history of the house and the relationship between Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe. When we decided to visit Vienna in 2020, I bought Simon Mawer's book, The Glass Room, and read that in the month or so before we visited the Villa Tugendhat. The Glass Room is not a book about the design and creation of the Villa Tugendhat. Nor is it about Mies van der Rohe or the Tugendhats. Not really. Although it totally is really.
The book is a work of fiction about a family (the Landauers) living in an avant garde house in Mesto, Czechoslovakia (there is no actual city of Mesto) with their housekeepers and nanny who have to leave behind their house in the face of the advancing Nazi army. While there is an acknowledgment that the house in the book is the Villa Tugendhat (without naming the house itself), the rest of the story is labeled as fiction, right down to the house being used as a dance studio and a children's hospital after the Landauers flee the German army.
It's a great introduction to the house and there are so many parts that mirror the actual history of the house that I found it extremely useful to know so of the history without having checked out how much of the alleged fictional story actually mimicked reality. Simon Mawer does an excellent job in that book and not just with evoking the spirit of that house. There is a lot that is extremely unpleasant in that book to read and I couldn't put down at all. The Villa Tugendhat exceeded my expectations set by the descriptions of the Landauer House, however. It was lighter and brighter and more open than I ever imagined it would be either from reading that book or by learning about the place earlier in my life in architecture school.
My recommendation is if you are anywhere near Brno and you are remotely interested in modern architecture, you should go here.
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| The Villa Tugendhat winter garden. |
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