Lot 257 R

Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

In 1929/30 Mies van der Rohe built a villa for the Jewish textile manufacturer Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Grete in Brno. It was a daringly modernist piece of architecture, spectacularly situated on a hill. The owner’s exclusive preferences appealed to the architect and his tendency towards the luxurious. Décor was replaced by the beauty of the material, creating, for instance, a wall made from polished onyx between the living and dining sections, as well as state-of-the-art technical installations. For example, the house had a sophisticated heating and ventilation system, and the garden-facing windows, going down to floor level, could be electrically lowered into the ground, thus potentially dissolving the boundaries between the inside and the outside. Some of the metal furniture, designed for the villa by Mies van der Rohe together with Lilly Reich, was later turned into mass-manufactured products, for instance, the famous "Tugendhat Chair". In 1939 the Tugendhats were expropriated by the Nazis and the villa was subsequently used for a variety of purposes after the war. It has now been listed as a UNESCO world cultural heritage site since 2001 and has largely been restored to its original state.