HISTORIC ARCHITECTURE: MIES VAN DER ROHE Revisiting the Landmark Tugendhat House

By Nicholas Fox Weber

After designing the progressive Barcelona Pa­vilion for the 1929 International Exposition, modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (inset) created a house for Fritz and Grete Tugendhat in Brno, Czechoslovakia.

ABOVE: The right-angled Tugendhat House, a wedding gift from Grete Tugendhat's fa­ther, overlooks the city. "We knew we were in the same room with an artist," said Mrs. Tugendhat of their first meeting with Mies.

74

LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE perfect­ed an elegant simplicity that changed architecture and design forever . He gave simultaneous voice to the beauty of functional form-undis­guised radiator pipes, frankly welded joints- and to the richness of un­adorned materials previously consid­ered beyond the pale. Two relatively small buildings of the late 1920s were his primary testing grounds and ex­emplars of these pioneering ideas. One was the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Bar­celona-destroyed long ago. The other was a house designed between 1928 and 1930 for Fritz and Grete Tugendhat on the outskirts of Brno, Czechoslovakia. And although the Tugendhat House had been butch­ered, raided and stripped- and more recently, compromised even in resto­ration- it still s tands. Now, with

BELOW: Mies's circa 1928 sketch shows the basic design: To conform to the hill, the house has a one-story street fa~de and a two-story garden fa~ade. The top level contains bed­rooms; the lower, living and dining areas.

BELOW LEFf: In his innovative plan, Mies opened up the traditional living and dining rooms to form one space. Divided by an onyx wall, the original living area and library, left, had furniture and fixtures designed by Mies .

. , If\

continued 011 page 78

HISTORIC ARCH ITECTURE: MIES VAN DER ROHE

Revisiting the Landmark Tugendhat House continued from page 74

LEFT: The chrome-plated columns and onyx wall have been restored to their former luster in a recent renovation. From the living area to the dining area, left, the columns carefully artic­ulate a rhythmic order within the strict interior proportions.

BELOW LEFT: The house's most striking spatial component is the curved ebony wall that defines the dining area. The en­closed space afforded wide views, while allowing the circula­tion of movement that made the residence so distinctive.

BELOW: Entering the top level from the street, one descends to the public spaces from a marble-floored entrance hall. A milk-white curved wall highlights the chrome-plated ele­ments and foreshadows the semicircular ebony wall below.

The building still has powerful elements of what it once was.

opening borders and increased re­gard for the arts in Czechoslovakia, it can be seen not as a relic in vintage photographs but as a living thing.

Although the Tugendhat House is a legend, many people-among them some of the most ardent Mies enthu­siasts- have long been unaware that it survives. Yet no one has questioned the vitality of its legacy. This was the place for which Mies designed the best-known coffee table of our cen­tury out of a simple X-shaped base made from four bar angles and an unframed square glass top. Almost as familiar today is the dining room chair-known as the "Brno" chair­that Mies put into the house. Truly

78

this chair exemplifies the architect's "less is more" philosophy; it is impos­sible to imagine how a seat, chair back and arms could be arranged more minimally, or more eloquently. The house in Brno also was the birthplace of the "Tugendhat" chair. An up­dated lounge chair with arms, the "Tudendhat" chair is akin to Mies's renowned "Barcelona" chair while being a bit more welcoming.

Not only have the furniture de­signs for the Tugendhat House en­tered the mainstream of modern life, but its layout and aesthetic choices changed twentieth-century vision. Writing about it in 1947, Philip John­son, who was a dinner guest there in the early 1930s, praised "the exquisite perfection of details" and "a scru­pulousness unparalleled in our day." The effect on some of Johnson's own designs, such as the interior of the Four Seasons restaurant, was vast. In 1960 Arthur Drexler, the influential director of the Architecture and De­sign Department at the Museum of Modern Art, called the house "one of the most uncompromising state­ments of the new architecture." It has been a standard-bearer, and a modern temple to the magisterial use of new materials, to open space and to a simplicity and refinement more lush than austere.

Today one can visit the house in

situ more easily than has been possi­ble for a long time. In so doing, one still sees it in light of the world for which it was made. The route to Brno is a fairy-tale landscape of crenellated castles perched on jagged mountains, and old churches that are all curve and fantasy.

When the Tugendhat House was built, modern streamlined forms were already in evidence in isolated pockets that could be reached in a day's train travel from Brno-Walter Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau, Adolf Loos's buildings in Vienna- but in general the world preferred a prolif­eration of complexity and ornament, whether Baroque or Jugendstil. The

continued on page 82

HISTORIC ARCH ITECTURE: M IES VAN DER ROHE

Tugendhats had grown up in houses where antimacassars were the order of the day, but Grete Tugendhat said her husband particularly had "a hor­ror of the doilies and knickknacks that overflowed every room" of his childhood dwelling. They craved "clear and simple forms." By picking Mies as their architect, not only would they get chairs of unadorned leather and steel, but the ornament in their house would be nil, the sight lines uncluttered. The Tugendhats endorsed Mies's pioneering notions of beauty, reevaluating what was ap­propriate as a source of household materials and what it took to make a home elegant. The young Czech cou­ple could live in a setting as efficient and unembellished as the latest man­ufacturing m achine. At the same time, they created a residence for themselves and their children as re­fined, as poetic, as r ich in certain ele­ments, as the palaces of earlier eras.

Their house was a wedding pres­ent from Grete Tugendhat's father, among the richest men in Brno in the 1920s. He had given her a sloping site overlooking Brno, with a command­ing view of cathedral steeples and the turrets and towers of Spielberg

Revisiting the Landmark Tugendhat House continued from page 78

castle. She had admired the open spaces-as well as the large glass doors that separated the living room from the garden- in the house of Eduard Fuchs in Berlin, and had asked the name of the arch itect. Learning it was Mies van der Rohe, she arranged a meeting.

From the start the Tugendh ats

The garden fa~ade is intact, an exceptionally

harmonic abstract composition.

knew they "were in the same room with an artist," said Grete Tugendhat. Mies and the people in his Berlin of­fice had one radical idea after an­other, and the Tugendhats accepted them all. (Years later, Mies would re­call that the Tugendhats- Fritz more than Crete-gave him a hard time and initially resisted each new con­cept, but these reminiscences are con­sidered largely inaccurate, intended mainly to enhance his own glory.) Mies's idea for the site was to have a

A view of the Tugendh at House at dusk d isplays the 15-foot-wide floor-to-ceiling wi}1· dows of the SO-foot-long living space. Mies design ed a system for raising and lowering the windows, which in the summer lent the m ain living space the feeling of a terrace.

82

single story, the top floor, at street level; it contained the bedrooms and nursery. The court in front led to a wraparound balcony and terrace on the other side facing the view. Inside the entrance hall were steps leading down to the lower level-a vast open space in which all that separated the living room, dining room and library were two freestanding walls, one curved and one flat. These rooms, mostly sheathed in glass, opened to the lawn and the city.

That large, continuous living/din­ing area, fifty by eighty feet, was punctuated by cross-shaped columns made by the joining of four L-beams encased in chrome. Similar to what Mies was using in the Barcelona Pa­vilion, they helped support the build­ing. What gave the house its structure could clearly be a source of beauty. Plainly visible horizontal slats were handsome evidence of one of the first air-conditioning systems in Europe, for which the air would be blown from ice stored in the basement. Heating came through straightfor­ward steel tubing. Modern technol­ogy was at the fore; the floor of the living/dining area was an expanse of white linoleum.

But there was no rule that every­thing had to be machine-made. The carpets, of natural wool, were hand­woven. Some of the materials were quite fine and exotic. The flat wall was tawny gold-and-w hite onyx from Algeria; draperies were Swed­ish linen, black-and-beige raw silk, and white velvet. Macassar ebony was abundant. Th e cantilevered chairs had lean lines that reflected the latest engineering advances and eschewed all decoration, but their coverings were of the finest pigskin and cowhide. Natural abundance, human handwork and modern tech­nology: All offered possibilities.

Mies personally designed every visible detail: the heating pipes, the drapery track holders, the door han­dles, the wooden-slatted venetian blinds, the lighting fixtures. He built

continued on page 84

.............. _____________________________________ ---

HISTOR.IC AR.CHITECTUR.E: MIES VAN DER. R.O HE

the large glass walls-through which living and dining areas overlooked the city-so they could be electrically lowered by increments, becoming partially open or disappearing alto­gether. He arranged the furniture meticulously. There was a black pearwood dining table supported by a single X-sectioned column. Without its leaf it allowed intimate dining for the Tugendhats and their three chil­dren; with the leaf in, there was room for up to twenty-four people to be seated in those first "Brno" chairs.

Brno had an ancient past, but in 1930 it was also a thriving modern city. The head of the Czechoslovakian republic then was Tomas Masaryk, who in 1918 had been elected its first president. He had attended grammar school in Brno, where he earned money by tutoring the family of a po­lice chief. Early on, Masaryk had ad­vocated the eight-hour workday and education for women. Having led Czechoslovakia to liberation from the Hapsburg monarchy, he condemned oppression in any form, opposed out­moded relics of the past and was sympathetic to all new ways of think­ing, including the most recent devel­opments in art and architecture. The Tugendhat House was built in a hos­pitable environment.

But the world soon changed. Not everyone endorsed this sort of thing; in 1931 the German magazine Die Form declared the house unlivable, an ostentatious showpiece more than a home. The Tugendhats defended their choices in a subsequent issue of the magazine, saying that the spaces gave them a new freedom, and that even if it was impossible to rearrange the furniture or hang pictures in the main living area, the wood graining and marble patterns offered great aes­thetic richness and diversity. It would eventually take more than words to defend their way of life, however. The Tugendhats, who were Jewish, left Czechoslovakia in 19 38, the year before the Third Reich entered. Soon thereafter, Albert Messerschmitt, the

84

Revisiting the Landmark Tugendhat House continued from page 8 2

aircraft manufacturer, moved into the house. In 1944, as the Wehrmacht was falling apart on the eastern front, the Red Army took over. Mies van der Rohe's biographer Franz Schulze writes, " The Russians rode their horses up and down the travertine garden staircase and roasted oxen on a spit in front of the onyx wall." The curved ebony dining room wall was destroyed. And in postwar Czecho­slovakia, the house fell into disrepair.

Today, Brno is somewhat pale after decades of bureaucratic Communist rule. Grim apartment blocks prolifer­ate alongside remnants of Baroque glory. Although a new spirit is in the air, the city looks down-at-the-heel.

Between 1982 and 1985, local au­thorities restored the house at a cost of six million crowns for the building and one million for the garden. It is now used as a guesthouse for official visitors to Brno, and parts of it are open to the public for guided tours on Saturday and Sunday. The building

The Tugendhats endorsed Mies' s

pioneering notions of beauty-reevaluating household materials.

still has powerful elements of what it once was, even if the differences from photographs of the house in its origi­nal state are shocking.

Not a stick of the original furniture remains. Recent Czechoslovakian art in low-priced frames hangs here and there, and televisions are every­where. An antenna on the roof of the house does no kindness to Mies' s pure and perfect form. The only way to enter the garden is to jump the padlocked fence. A notice is taped to the curved entrance wall, now made of opaque plastic panels rather than the original expanse of milk glass.

A few leaks are visible in the ceiling. It has not been possible, or perhaps

desirable, to recreate the atmosphere of a private residence where seven­teen servants once worked. Indeed, the idea of an onyx panel worth three million crowns is troublesome in a country where people may have the freedom to cross the border to Austria but can scarcely afford a cup of Vien­nese coffee. But even if it has not en­tirely honored the aesthetic of the Tugendhat House, the city of Brno has kept it alive. The onyx wall, and many other elements of the original house, make thrilling viewing. And as barriers with the West diminish, and art begins to enjoy its rightful place in the hierarchy of human en­deavors, things may get better yet.

People in Brno are proud of the Tugendhat House. They lack the money to restore the monument en­tirely, but they have made an admira­ble effort. Unable to reconstruct the floor-to-ceiling glass walls to their original appearance, they have man­aged to redo them with a seam, and they have had the curved dining room wall rebuilt. The lawn needs seeding, and one longs for the garden on which Mies carefully consulted, but at least the garden fa~ade is in­tact, an exceptionally harmonic ab­stract composition. The intersection of machined planes at right angles­whether in outside details or in the travertine marble slabs over the ra­diators-remains a powerful form of modern beauty. The trees have grown higher than Mies might have wished, but visitors can still walk on a sweep of balcony and gaze at the castles and church towers. And they can sit there on an extraordi­nary semicircular bench that typifies Mies's eye and his imagination with materials. The bench, which echoes the shape of the dining room wall, is made of wood on cinder blocks with backing of stovepipe. The materials may seem rough, but the form is inexorably gentle. At his best, Mies van der Rohe could be exceedingly

continued on page 86

HISTORIC A RC HITECTURE

Mies van der Rohe continued from page 84

generous in his understanding of the need for grace and pleasantness in everyday life.

Moreover, the chrome-plated X­columns look great today: sculptural and functional at the same time, no­ble yet ligh thearted. And given that the Barcelona Pavilion no lon ger stands, they provide an opportunity to relish one of its key features. Other original details- the wooden blinds, the frankly functional heating and air-conditioning elements- are also in evidence. And the onyx wall re­flects and absorbs the setting sun with the bravura it had sixty years ago. The travertine marble is still in the entrance hall. Few of Mies's light­ing fixtures are in place, but one of his designs for a ceiling lamp has been reproduced in a num ber of rooms. Throughout the house, the eb­ony is remarkable. The bedroom doors, each almost eleven and a half feet high, dazzle w ith both their warmth and their scale.

With imagination, one can picture what a unique and salubrious house it once was. There is still an enclosed winter garden. The library needs ad­ditional restoration and the correct furnishings, but at least its dramatic shelving is unchanged, and one can glimpse an adjoining space that gives great insight into the Tugendhats' way of life: a small cubicle in which Fritz Tugendhat kept his business pa­pers. He felt that such papers were unattractive in a home and should be out of view. A library was for loftier purposes, and children should not concern themselves with money mat­ters. That degree of cultivation, and deference to a seamless style of every­day living, reflects the attitude that made Mies van der Rohe's taste so ideal for his patrons. Refinement, dignity-and the mix of careful un­derstatement with consummate lux­ury-reached their apogee in the Tugendhat dwelling, where a young and forward-thinking couple gave an architect of such exceptional vision and courage the opportunity to have his full voice. 0

ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE OF FINE INTERIOR DESIGN OCTOBER 1990 $5.00