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A UNESCO World Heritage site, Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic was designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built between the years 1928-1930 for Fritz Tugendhat and his wife, Greta. Photo by Mr. Hyde.

Czech Bauhaus villa reopens after major renovation

A UNESCO World Heritage site, Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic was designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built between the years 1928-1930 for Fritz Tugendhat and his wife, Greta. Photo by Mr. Hyde.
A UNESCO World Heritage site, Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic was designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built between the years 1928-1930 for Fritz Tugendhat and his wife, Greta. Photo by Mr. Hyde.

BRNO, Czech Republic (AFP) – The UNESCO-listed Tugendhatvilla, a Bauhaus-style architectural gem in the southern Czech city of Brno, reopened Wednesday, following a complete renovation.

The clean-lined 20th-century villa nestled in a vast sloping garden is the work of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), head of the celebrated Bauhaus school that sought to accentuate architecture as an art.

“The radical ideas used by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe here influenced to a great extent the entire evolution of 20th-century architecture,” Pavel Ciprian, head of the Brno municipal museum, said at the reopening ceremony.

In the design, the architect abandoned the idea of separate rooms, opting instead for a vast open space of 250 square metres (2,691 square feet), from which giant windows frame views of the sprawling gardens and the city.

The villa was built in 1929-1930 for Jewish entrepreneur Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Greta.

In 1938, the family fled for Switzerland and then Venezuela to escape Nazi Germany’s occupation of the country during World War II.

“A house built for a family has become a work of art,” said Daniela Hammer Tugendhat, one of the four children of the builders.

Since the start of the war, the villa’s fate echoed that of the country—it was seized by the Nazis to serve as a studio for the German Messerschmitt aviation factory, and then it was confiscated by the Soviet army.

After the war, the villa became the property of the Czechoslovak state in 1955. It was modified to serve as a re-education center for children before being revamped for representative purposes in the 1980s.

The villa was the setting for key talks between the Czech and Slovak prime ministers, Vaclav Klaus and Vladimir Meciar, in 1992 in the run-up to the peaceful split of the former Czechoslovakia into two countries a year later.

UNESCO put the villa on its world heritage list in December 2001.

“The renovation was carried out by a Czech company but under the supervision of the whole world,” said Roman Onderka, the mayor of Brno, which lies 200 kilometres (125 miles) southeast of the Czech capital Prague.

He said that the renovation had cost 170 million Czech koruna (6.8 million euros, $9.2 million).


ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE


A UNESCO World Heritage site, Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic was designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built between the years 1928-1930 for Fritz Tugendhat and his wife, Greta. Photo by Mr. Hyde.
A UNESCO World Heritage site, Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic was designed by German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built between the years 1928-1930 for Fritz Tugendhat and his wife, Greta. Photo by Mr. Hyde.