Located in the city of Brno, about 200km from Prague, in Austria, the recently married couple Grete and Fritz Tugendhat received the land of 2000m² as a wedding gift from the bride’s father, an influential textile manufacturer, Alfred Löw-Beer. They decided to give Ludwig Mies van der Rohe free rein over the design and construction of their villa.
It was a revolutionary flat-roofed villa containing an iron framework, that allowed the architect to dispense with supporting walls, and enveloped by glass windows that helped to create a flowing interior swimming in space and light, and featuring a thick onyx interior wall that changes colour in winter months when hit by the sun at certain angles.
Modernist architecture is often associated with austere office buildings and anonymous apartment blocks, but a walk through the Tugendhat Villa shows how modernist ideas could inspire unparalleled domestic luxury: over eight decades since its completion, this iconic work has undergone a complicated development as a building both in terms of its structure and the socio-political circumstances surrounding it. Indeed, the ultramodern construction has been many things: a family home, Gestapo headquarters, a dance school, a clinic, and the subject of a novel.
Spread out over three levels, which seem to disappear into the slope of a hill overlooking the city, the enormous, 2600m² house featured pieces of specially designed furniture that are now icons of 20th century design ( the Tugendhat chair and the Brno chair are still in production.) There were no paintings or decorative items in the villa but the interior was by no means boring, due to the use of naturally patterned materials such as the onyx wall and rare tropical woods.
“ The location of the structure, its location in relation to the sun, the layout of the spaces and the construction materials are the essential factors for creating a dwelling house,” said Mies van der Rohe in 1924 when designing the villa. “A building organism must be created out of these conditions ”
Built of reinforced concrete, Villa Tugendhat soon became an icon of modernism. The 3 storey house became famous as one of the pioneering prototypes of modern architecture – in terms of the structural system, layout, interior furnishing, services and the integration of the building into the natural environment.
The innovative and progressive design of the house is immediately apparent upon entry. It’s easy to forget that it was built in the late twenties because it feels like a building from a later decade. You enter at the top and descend into the large open living space. This inversion of traditional design is the least of Mies’ departures from conventional architecture. The architect presented the completed design for the villa by the end of 1928. His design was based on the concept of Germany’s pavilion for the international exhibition in Barcelona, which he adapted to the needs of his customers in Brno.
The uniqueness of the design lies in the use of a steel support structure (the first time it had been used for a detached house), which enabled unlimited ways of handling the interiors as well as the generous glazing of the facade. The design produces the free-flowing space in the main residential hall and its merging with the exterior through large sliding windows.
His revolutionary approach started with the support. Twenty-nine steel columns hold up the house. This frame eliminates the need for load-bearing walls in the living area, so it is open, light, and spacious. The columns, still in their original stainless steel casings – now polished to a mirror shine, also form part of the interior decor.
The 3 levels villa is set on a slope and its main living spaces face southwest towards the garden.
The first floor, the basement, contains the utility facilities.
The second floor, the ground floor consists of the main living and social areas with the conservatory and the terrace
as well as the kitchen with facilities along with the servants’ rooms.
The third floor, the first floor, has the main entrance from the street with a passage to the terrace, the entrance hall, the rooms for the parents, children and the nanny with appropriate facilities. The chauffeur’s flat with the garages and the terrace are accessible separately.
Therefore, the street facade consists only of the third level with a gracefully sunk entrance door and the garage with the chauffeur’s apartment, the volume of which on the entrance terrace frames a view of the city with their shared roof.
The entrance hall leads to the bedrooms of the parents, children and governess; these rooms also have access to the upper terrace overlooking the garden.
A spiral staircase descends to the second floor with the flowing living space, which, owing to the generous glazing and conservatory, visually merges with the exterior. The villa’s individual functional zones are merely hinted by impressive partitions or curtains.
The dining corner is separated from the rest of the free space by a round ebony screen; the study and the sitting space are separated by a wall of Moroccan onyx which colours the room red at sunset.
The architect designed the interior furnishings along with his collaborators Lilly Reich, Hermann John and Sergio Ruegenberg; these involve bent tubular furniture (the Brno chair, the Tugendhat and Barcelona armchairs) and built-in wooden furniture from fine hardwoods manufactured by Jan
Vanek’s interior design company Standard. The highlights of the entire residential space involve its technical equipment including the ingenious air conditioning system which cleans the air and freshens it with sea salt and the large windows in metal frames, which can be fully rolled down into the floor. The dining area provides direct access to the terrace with the staircase and the garden designed by Mies and Brno garden designer Markéta Roderová-Müllerová. The service areas of the villa are accessible via a separate entrance from the street and consist of the kitchen and domestic staff rooms on the second floor as well as vast technical facilities on the ground floor. The construction of the plastered structure consists of a steel skeleton, reinforced concrete ceilings and brick masonry.
The subtle supporting columns of a cross-shaped profile are anchored in concrete bases and partially lead through the masonry and partially through the spaces of all the floors. Shiny chrome classing is employed in the living area.
The individual functional zones within the area are divided up by the wall from honey and yellow coloured onyx with white veins from the foothills of the Atlas in Morocco and the half-circular wall originally from Macassar ebony wood mined on the island of Celebes in south-east Asia. An additional separate room could be entered through drawing back curtains made from shantung silk and velvet. The most prominent feature of the ‘flowing’ living area was the grand seating arrangement in front of the onyx wall and the dining room demarcated by the half-cylinder from Makassar ebony. The interior could be connected up with the garden through suspension of the two large window panes.
The office with the library and the adjoining winter garden was behind the onyx wall. Behind the ebony curved wall was a seating area next to a wall from milk glass which could be lit up.
It was completed in December 1930 when the Tugendhats finally moved into the house.
Edith Farnsworth, a brilliant doctor, first met Mies at a cocktail party in Chicago. Familiar with his work, she asked if he would design a small weekend retreat for her on the banks of the Fox River in Piano, IL. Upon visiting the 64-acre site, largely within a flood plain, Mies perceived the true power already present within the natural landscape. Thus began his quest for a transparent structure that would minimize the boundary between man and the natural world. With an open floor plan of only 2400 square feet, he created three distinct spatial interfaces: a transparent house, a covered terrace, and an open deck.
