Villa Tugendhat, located on a slope in suburban Brno and widely considered one of the country's architectural jewels, officially received its UNESCO designation as a world heritage site in August.
It is now the eleventh UNESCO-listed site in the Czech Republic. "It is a great honor to be listed and it puts the villa in [a bigger] spotlight," said Jiri Vanek, head of the Brno Museum.
The villa is the work of German-born Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who fled the Nazis and emigrated to the United States in 1938. He was mainly known as a pioneer architect of skyscrapers, including two glass and metal tower apartment blocks on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago and the Seagram Building in New York in the late '40s to '50s.
But in Europe, Mies was already regarded as a master of the modernist movement for his design of the German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition in 1929. Famous for designing every detail himself, Mies applied some of the design concepts of the Barcelona pavilion to the design of the Brno villa, commissioned by a young married couple who asked him to build them a "comfortable house."
The villa's investors and inhabitants, Greta and Fritz Tugendhat, came from prominent Jewish Brno families. The property on which the villa was built-the upper part of Greta's parents' park-was a wedding gift. The villa was completed in 1930, but the couple didn't get to enjoy their house for long. They were forced to flee the Nazis in 1937, and the house was confiscated.
The house was then occupied by the Messerschmidt family, who oversaw warplane production in Brno factories. The villa was damaged at the end of the war during bombing raids, which broke the house's unusually large windows.
For a brief time after the war, the villa housed a dance academy. For decades, until the early '80s, it was used as a children's physical therapy center. In those years of the communist regime, the villa fell into disrepair and required a reconstruction in the mid-'80s.
Vocabulary
| property(n) | vlastnost |
| enjoy(v.) | požívat, mít radost |
| force (v.) | přinutit, donutit |
| oversee (v.) | kontrolovat |
| damage (v.) | zničit, poškodit |
| require (v.) | vyžadovat, potřebovat |
| deterioration (n) | zhoršení, úpadek |
| preservation (n) | ochrana, uchování |
| value (v.) | ohodnotit, ocenit |
| layout (n) | plán, návrh |
| surrounding | obklopený, ohraničený |
| reflect (v.) | zobrazovat, vyjadřovat |