FROM the outside, the Tugendhat House doesn’t look like one of the most important residential buildings of the 20th century: it’s just two white stucco cubes separated by an opening through which a few spiky treetops protrude. But as a tour guide led a group of 10 through this modern home in the Czech Republic’s second-largest city in early March, it was clear that there was much more to the house, the bulk of which is built on the steep hillside that drops away from the street.
Massive terraces wrap around the upper story. Below, a vast living space is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass walls that look out on the garden below, so that even on a rainy day it is bright, almost cheerful. The space is divided only by a semicircular wood wall that creates a dining nook and a free-standing wall of solid onyx that separates the main seating area from a study, and that glows in the afternoon light. Two of the exterior walls even roll down like car windows, letting in the sound of chirping birds.
“The whole living area is really overwhelming,” said Anita Cremers, a tourist from Utrecht, the Netherlands, who visited the house on a whim after seeing it in a brochure. “I’m really glad I came by.”
But like the 15,000 others who visit this 1930 masterpiece by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe every year, Ms. Cremers couldn’t help but notice that it is in dire need of restoration.
The house, a World Heritage site, was “fundamental to the development of Modern architecture,” according to Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. But it is also growing increasingly dilapidated, or “wasting away,” as The Prague Post put it in a recent article.
The house’s condition has sparked a battle over who will control its future and ensure its survival: the city of Brno, which now owns it, or the heirs of the original owners, Jews who fled Czechoslovakia in 1938. The city says it recognizes the family’s moral right to the home, and the family says it wants to keep it open for the people of the city, but neither side seems to trust the other’s ability to manage the restoration work and maintenance that will be necessary.
On March 20, the Brno city council, citing various legal technicalities, voted not to return the house to the family, although the conflict is likely to continue.
The house embodies some of Mies’s most influential ideas, which went on to become hallmarks of Modernism: free-flowing, open living space; a connection to the outside through transparent walls; the use of a grid of columns instead of load-bearing walls. It was also a project for which Mies designed every detail, from the doorknobs and light fixtures to the Tugendhat and Brno chairs, now classics of 20th-century design produced and sold by Knoll.
Mr. Bergdoll sneaked into the house as a student in the late 1970s, just before a poorly executed restoration by the Communist government, and featured it prominently in a major show on Mies that he was a co-curator of at MoMA in 2001. “There is not an architecture student alive that has not studied that building,” he said.
Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, the youngest daughter of the original owners, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, is well aware of the house’s significance. An art history professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she has spent much of her life trying to make sure that it is properly cared for.
Sitting in the living room of her Vienna apartment one evening in March, Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat, 60, turned the pages of a book about the house that she edited in 2000. Her fingers trailed across a black and white image of her siblings when they were children, standing around a Christmas tree with toys strewn at their feet — a rare image of childhood disarray in the iconic Modernist living area.
“I don’t know of any modern space that feels like that house,” Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said. “I can stay in that room for hours; it’s like meditation. It’s not just a nice house, it does something to you.”
Though she never lived in the house — she was born in Venezuela after the war — it has become her obsession. For decades, she and her husband, Ivo Hammer, a professor of conservation at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim, Germany, and a restorer of murals, petitioned the Communist and then post-Communist governments to have it opened to the public and then to have it properly restored.
FROM the outside, the Tugendhat House doesn’t look like one of the most important residential buildings of the 20th century: it’s just two white stucco cubes separated by an opening through which a few spiky treetops protrude. But as a tour guide led a group of 10 through this modern home in the Czech Republic’s second-largest city in early March, it was clear that there was much more to the house, the bulk of which is built on the steep hillside that drops away from the street.
Massive terraces wrap around the upper story. Below, a vast living space is surrounded by floor-to-ceiling glass walls that look out on the garden below, so that even on a rainy day it is bright, almost cheerful. The space is divided only by a semicircular wood wall that creates a dining nook and a free-standing wall of solid onyx that separates the main seating area from a study, and that glows in the afternoon light. Two of the exterior walls even roll down like car windows, letting in the sound of chirping birds.
“The whole living area is really overwhelming,” said Anita Cremers, a tourist from Utrecht, the Netherlands, who visited the house on a whim after seeing it in a brochure. “I’m really glad I came by.”
But like the 15,000 others who visit this 1930 masterpiece by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe every year, Ms. Cremers couldn’t help but notice that it is in dire need of restoration.
The house, a World Heritage site, was “fundamental to the development of Modern architecture,” according to Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. But it is also growing increasingly dilapidated, or “wasting away,” as The Prague Post put it in a recent article.
The house’s condition has sparked a battle over who will control its future and ensure its survival: the city of Brno, which now owns it, or the heirs of the original owners, Jews who fled Czechoslovakia in 1938. The city says it recognizes the family’s moral right to the home, and the family says it wants to keep it open for the people of the city, but neither side seems to trust the other’s ability to manage the restoration work and maintenance that will be necessary.
On March 20, the Brno city council, citing various legal technicalities, voted not to return the house to the family, although the conflict is likely to continue.
The house embodies some of Mies’s most influential ideas, which went on to become hallmarks of Modernism: free-flowing, open living space; a connection to the outside through transparent walls; the use of a grid of columns instead of load-bearing walls. It was also a project for which Mies designed every detail, from the doorknobs and light fixtures to the Tugendhat and Brno chairs, now classics of 20th-century design produced and sold by Knoll.
Mr. Bergdoll sneaked into the house as a student in the late 1970s, just before a poorly executed restoration by the Communist government, and featured it prominently in a major show on Mies that he was a co-curator of at MoMA in 2001. “There is not an architecture student alive that has not studied that building,” he said.
Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, the youngest daughter of the original owners, Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, is well aware of the house’s significance. An art history professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she has spent much of her life trying to make sure that it is properly cared for.
Sitting in the living room of her Vienna apartment one evening in March, Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat, 60, turned the pages of a book about the house that she edited in 2000. Her fingers trailed across a black and white image of her siblings when they were children, standing around a Christmas tree with toys strewn at their feet — a rare image of childhood disarray in the iconic Modernist living area.
“I don’t know of any modern space that feels like that house,” Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said. “I can stay in that room for hours; it’s like meditation. It’s not just a nice house, it does something to you.”
Though she never lived in the house — she was born in Venezuela after the war — it has become her obsession. For decades, she and her husband, Ivo Hammer, a professor of conservation at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Hildesheim, Germany, and a restorer of murals, petitioned the Communist and then post-Communist governments to have it opened to the public and then to have it properly restored.
A restoration project was finally in the works last year, but after a dispute arose over a contract, the search for builders was halted in December — a final delay in a long string of them, Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said, and the last straw for her.
She asked the city to return the house to her family, believing that they could make the restoration happen, even if the city could not. Because laws allowing the return of real estate appropriated during the war expired in 1995, her lawyer, Marc Richter, argued that the house should be returned under laws governing stolen artwork.
The city seemed inclined to oblige until early February, when the family sold a Wilhelm Lehmbruck statue, “Torso of a Walking Woman,” that had once stood in the house and that had been returned to them by the Moravian Gallery in Brno, the Czech Republic’s second largest museum, the summer before.
The statue was sold to a private collector for more than $2 million at Sotheby’s in London, and after the auction, attitudes in Brno changed, said Mayor Roman Onderka. “The only thing I can say about the situation is disappointment,” Mr. Onderka said through a translator. He felt the statue, which was a prominent feature of the living space in the 1930s — and which has been replaced there by a replica in recent years — should have been returned to the house.
Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said she was “furious” about such criticism. “I think it’s strange for me to be criticized over selling a piece of art that belongs to me.” She said that her mother first asked for the statue in 1969, and that the Moravian Gallery had for decades claimed it was lost. “The gallery never even exhibited the statue,” she said.
The museum also has four pieces of furniture originally made for the house that Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat has agreed to display in the home when it’s renovated. “No one talks about that,” she said.
But Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat’s argument does not seem to resonate in Brno. Mayor Onderka, who sees the house as a treasured piece of Brno’s cultural identity and a potential catalyst for tourism, wants the city to handle its restoration — not only, he suggests, because of the distrust engendered in Brno by the sale of the statue, but because he has doubts about whether the family can afford the restoration.
Restoring the house may cost as much as $7.5 million, according to one published estimate, and Mr. Onderka said he has already put aside $1.9 million in this year’s city budget toward the cause. But Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said that she plans to create a foundation that would own the home and raise funds for its restoration while providing the family with some level of control.
Certainly, whoever controls the house will have a lot to contend with. Mark Weber, the technical director at the World Monuments Fund, which has provided financing and expertise to assess the state of the house, said that a portion of the hillside may be unstable, causing foundation problems.
Several of the exterior walls have significant cracks. Not a single cabinet is left in the empty kitchen. And then there is the Communist-era restoration. New fixtures, reminiscent of an ’80s hotel, were added in the bathroom. Many of the glass walls were replaced with thinner, smaller sheets of glass, leaving seams where none should be.
Mr. Hammer, who has researched the surfaces of the home extensively, said there are as many as eight layers of paint on walls that were originally bare plaster. The semicircular wood-veneer wall that demarcates the dining space is a poor replica.
A few weeks before the city council’s vote on March 20, standing in her late 19th-century Vienna apartment, Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat pulled open the drawers of a sideboard by Mies’s collaborator Lilly Reich, which still slide effortlessly 75 years after the piece was made for the house. (It is one of a few furnishings that the family took with them in 1938.)
She pointed to several color photographs on her living room wall that her father took in the 1930s. One shows a vase of flowers next to the onyx wall, another the cross-shaped column from the home’s main room. In these pictures the house takes a background role to the family, a reminder that it was once a cherished home as well as a living piece of architectural history.
“Perhaps all this controversy is good, in a way,” Ms. Hammer-Tugendhat said. “At least now people are talking about it; it’s getting attention.”
After the city council vote, however, she was less sanguine. “Perhaps there is still a solution which will be good for the house and the city, I don’t know,” she said. “It does not look good.”
The mayor, on the other hand, seemed to be galvanized into action, saying that he would instruct his deputy mayor to begin preparing for the renovation of the house the next morning. “We have one single purpose and that is to renovate the villa as soon, as quickly and as best as is possible,” he said through the translator.
Asked about why, in his view, the city council would vote to deny the family’s petition, he said that all the many legal issues were taken into consideration, but added, “in my personal opinion, the sale of the statue might have influenced some people.” Still, he said, “cooperation with the family is a long-term thing. Now we want to stress that even more.”
Source: NYTimes
