This
marked the beginning of Mies working and personal relationship with the
architect and designer Lilly Reich (1885-1947). Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe participated along with her in the exhibition in Stuttgart as both
an artist and as vice-chairman of the Werkbund as well as at the fashion
exhibition in Berlin.
Simultaneous events
1927 Stuttgart and Berlin
The exhibition of the German Werkbund Housing
(Die Wohnung) took place in Stuttgart from July to October 1927. 17
architects were invited to build 21 houses with 63 flats at the
Weissenhof (Weissenhofsiedlung)...
read more這一棟Tugendhat House
似乎是Herbert Simon 在 IIT 問Ludwig Mies van der Rohe:
如何可以說服業主 讓他設計這樣新潮的東西?
Mies 回答: 這很簡單. 我跟他們喝紅酒. 第二杯他們就全都答應了. (參考Models of My Life/ 拙譯待出版)
BBC (2005) Wikipedia article "Around the World in 80 Treasures".
在紐約和德國兩次取Ludwig Mies van der Rohe born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies (March 27, 1886 – August 17, 1969) was a German-born American architect. [1]http://www.answers.com/topic/ludwig-mies-van-der-rohe?cat=entertainment
的作品 :the Seagram Building in New York.
德國 Bauhaus, 去看 Brno Chair (The Brno Chair at the Bauhaus)
2008.4.6
這棟在共產時代被改為"體育館"呢....
Then followed the Tugendhat House, Brno, Czechoslovakia (1930), with a single storey on the street-frontage and two storeys facing the garden. The living-room was a continuous space with chromium-cased steel columns and free-standing panel, derived from the Barcelona design, while the full-height windows could be fully lowered out of sight, enabling the interior space to extend into the garden terrace. Every detail of the house was purpose-made, designed by the architect.
***
2012
Cultured Traveler
A Czech Trove of Minimalist Design
By EVAN RAIL
Best known for a newly renovated architectural marvel, Brno is home to hundreds of modernist buildings.
The Villa Tugendhat: ‘If the plan is lucid, the dissolving effects of the surfaces confound the senses.’ Photograph: Alamy
When Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
declared that "less is more" he was not talking about budgets. Saving
money was rarely among his concerns, and one of the many amazing things
about his Villa Tugendhat,
completed in 1930 in the Czech city of Brno, is the stupendous price of
its apparent simplicity. It cost five million Czech crowns at a time
when a very respectable luxury villa could be built for about 320,000
crowns. In other words, it cost 15 times the going rate for houses of
this type; he could accurately have said "less costs more".
Not that his clients, Grete and Fritz Tugendhat, both heirs to industrial fortunes, complained. What they got for their money was a pioneering steel-framed house, equipped with glass walls that could slide down into the floor, a special room for keeping their furs chilled and moth-free, and a heating and cooling facility like the engine room of a ship, which consumed a train-wagon-load of coal every winter. It also passed air through a shower of water, over stones taken from the sea, then through filters of cedar oil and cedar shavings, in order to make it cool and fragrant.
They got one of the most influential houses of the 20th century, whose open plan and panoramic glazing are still imitated today. Most importantly, they achieved what Greta called "a modern spacious house… with clear and simple shapes" that gave "a completely special calm". It did justice, she said, "to the primarily spiritual sense of life of each and every one of us, as opposed to mere necessity".
It has been variously claimed that modernist architecture was about rationality, or pure function, or raising the environments of the working classes; none of those arguments applied in this case.
Now, for the first time since the 1930s, it is possible to see the house more or less as Mies (as the architect is best known) intended, following a restoration supported by the EU and carried out by the city of Brno. It can be visited by the public, although its popularity means you have to book a place on its tours long in advance.
Above all, you can experience the living area at the centre of the house. To say that this has two glass walls, an open plan and clean, modernist style is like saying that Chartres cathedral has pointed arches and big windows. Nor does it get you very much further to describe the beautiful materials acquired from distant regions – macassar ebony for the library and the circular dining alcove; a wall in miraculously thin onyx slabs quarried from the Atlas mountains. Nor the spectacular view of the city, the sense of contact with the garden, the abundant light, nor the way that the steel columns, with their mirror finish, almost disappear.
The point is more that the combination of all these elements is mesmerising. If the plan, with the regular spacing of the columns, is lucid, the dissolving effects of the surfaces confound the senses. Reflections draw the garden foliage inside and the patterns of leaves play off the squirming, fossilised patterns of the stone and the grain of the wood. The creamy-brown onyx is plainly heavy, but it is thin enough that, when hit by the low winter sun, it glows on its inward side. The vanishing columns make the ceiling slab levitate, and when the glass walls disappear into the floor the room becomes a theatre box in the sky. At one end the glass is doubled, with space between the layers wide enough for a cuboid conservatory, which again inverts the perception of outside and in.
The surfaces are lush and the lines are spare. The space is ancient and industrial at once, with the construction methods of office blocks, and a pale linoleum floor combined with classical proportions, the rhythms of a temple and travertine. It is made of different scales of time – the geology of the stone, the tree growth recorded in the wood grain, the seasonal revolutions of the garden, the movement of daylight, the movements of people through the space. Silk curtains made it another place at night.
It is dreamlike, the more so for the way that boundaries are drawn with a sharpness something like the uncanny precision you get in dreams. It is a bubble made of straight lines and right angles. Its illusions are framed with the regular measure of the columns, like bar lines in music, and proportions (of which Mies said, disingenuously: "Proportions don't cost anything").
The house is built against a steep slope, with the living space in the middle one of three levels. Below is the apparatus that sustains it, like the backstage of a theatre – the heating and ventilating, the fur room, storage, laundry and the machinery for operating the windows. Above are the bedrooms and bathrooms of the Tugendhats and their children, and a terrace with a Miesian sandbox, perfectly square, and trellises for roses.
Because of the slope, only the top floor is visible when you approach from the street. You enter and a stair descends through what seems to be ground level to the living space, which in turn seems to hover above the garden, an upside-down sequence which further heightens its quality of apparition. You discover that everything in the house revolves around and sustains the central zone. Other aspects are special enough – the daring simplicity of the exterior and the refinement of the bedrooms would have been sufficient achievements for many architects – but here they support the main event.
All of which could add up to a familiar type of architecture, the uninhabitable masterpiece. Critics latched on to this possibility early, and a German architectural magazine asked, within a year of its completion: "Can One Live in Villa Tugendhat?" Greta and Fritz replied robustly that yes, you could. Their wishes were perfectly fulfilled, they said, and the design allowed different activities happily to co-exist. It was "austere and grand – not in a way that oppresses, but one that liberates". They spoke fondly of the way their children could play on the terrace, and of "sitting in the warm sun and looking out on the snow-covered landscape just as though we were in Davos". Mies later designed the Farnsworth House in Illinois, whose impracticalities drove its owner, Edith Farnsworth, to fury and lawsuits. In Brno, however, he achieved a miraculous union of art and life.
It did not last. Just over seven years after they moved in, the Tugendhats, who were Jewish, foresaw the approach of the Nazis and left for Switzerland, and then Venezuela. When they arrived, the Nazis appropriated the house and rented it out to the Messerschmitt aircraft company. They took the timber lining of the dining alcove and reinstalled it in the town's Gestapo headquarters. Shockwaves from allied bombs blew out the glass walls. The Soviet army took it and stabled horses among the exquisite veneers. After the war, it became a ballet studio, a rehabilitation centre for children with spinal defects and a guest house for the government. In 1992 the Czech and Slovak leaders met here to agree the division of their country. The house was a bubble in time as well as space and Greta's "completely special calm" was engulfed by the tumult of its period.
Its story is too good to go unnoticed by novelists, and it has not: Simon Mawer's 2009 Booker-shortlisted The Glass Room is a lightly fictionalised account of the Tugendhats and their house. Its descriptions of the place are evocative, but nothing can compare with the real thing, which, thanks to the EU millions, is about as close to its original state as could be hoped for. The timber abducted by the Gestapo was rediscovered and returned, having meanwhile become the setting of a student cafeteria, and the vibrant red and green chairs with which Mies furnished the space have been reinstalled. It is also different – it is no longer a private house for a highly privileged couple (which led a snarky critic to call it "modernist snobbery… the renewal of fancy baroque palaces, the seat of a new financial aristocracy") but a three-dimensional artwork and museum piece to be visited by the public.
Brno is a town whose location and identity most Britons, maybe even Observer readers, would be hard put to describe. Yet it has had a way of compressing a lot of history into its locality (rather, one is tempted to say, as it compresses a lot of sounds into its consonant-heavy name). The battle of Austerlitz took place just outside the town; Gregor Mendel invented modern genetics in the town's Abbey of St Thomas and Sigmund Freud was born in the region. In the 1920s the most optimistic time in Czechoslovakia's short life, it was a leading centre of modern architecture, several years ahead of London, for example. The vitality of that time has not returned, but in the Villa Tugendhat something of its spirit lives on.
Not that his clients, Grete and Fritz Tugendhat, both heirs to industrial fortunes, complained. What they got for their money was a pioneering steel-framed house, equipped with glass walls that could slide down into the floor, a special room for keeping their furs chilled and moth-free, and a heating and cooling facility like the engine room of a ship, which consumed a train-wagon-load of coal every winter. It also passed air through a shower of water, over stones taken from the sea, then through filters of cedar oil and cedar shavings, in order to make it cool and fragrant.
They got one of the most influential houses of the 20th century, whose open plan and panoramic glazing are still imitated today. Most importantly, they achieved what Greta called "a modern spacious house… with clear and simple shapes" that gave "a completely special calm". It did justice, she said, "to the primarily spiritual sense of life of each and every one of us, as opposed to mere necessity".
It has been variously claimed that modernist architecture was about rationality, or pure function, or raising the environments of the working classes; none of those arguments applied in this case.
Now, for the first time since the 1930s, it is possible to see the house more or less as Mies (as the architect is best known) intended, following a restoration supported by the EU and carried out by the city of Brno. It can be visited by the public, although its popularity means you have to book a place on its tours long in advance.
Above all, you can experience the living area at the centre of the house. To say that this has two glass walls, an open plan and clean, modernist style is like saying that Chartres cathedral has pointed arches and big windows. Nor does it get you very much further to describe the beautiful materials acquired from distant regions – macassar ebony for the library and the circular dining alcove; a wall in miraculously thin onyx slabs quarried from the Atlas mountains. Nor the spectacular view of the city, the sense of contact with the garden, the abundant light, nor the way that the steel columns, with their mirror finish, almost disappear.
The point is more that the combination of all these elements is mesmerising. If the plan, with the regular spacing of the columns, is lucid, the dissolving effects of the surfaces confound the senses. Reflections draw the garden foliage inside and the patterns of leaves play off the squirming, fossilised patterns of the stone and the grain of the wood. The creamy-brown onyx is plainly heavy, but it is thin enough that, when hit by the low winter sun, it glows on its inward side. The vanishing columns make the ceiling slab levitate, and when the glass walls disappear into the floor the room becomes a theatre box in the sky. At one end the glass is doubled, with space between the layers wide enough for a cuboid conservatory, which again inverts the perception of outside and in.
The surfaces are lush and the lines are spare. The space is ancient and industrial at once, with the construction methods of office blocks, and a pale linoleum floor combined with classical proportions, the rhythms of a temple and travertine. It is made of different scales of time – the geology of the stone, the tree growth recorded in the wood grain, the seasonal revolutions of the garden, the movement of daylight, the movements of people through the space. Silk curtains made it another place at night.
It is dreamlike, the more so for the way that boundaries are drawn with a sharpness something like the uncanny precision you get in dreams. It is a bubble made of straight lines and right angles. Its illusions are framed with the regular measure of the columns, like bar lines in music, and proportions (of which Mies said, disingenuously: "Proportions don't cost anything").
The house is built against a steep slope, with the living space in the middle one of three levels. Below is the apparatus that sustains it, like the backstage of a theatre – the heating and ventilating, the fur room, storage, laundry and the machinery for operating the windows. Above are the bedrooms and bathrooms of the Tugendhats and their children, and a terrace with a Miesian sandbox, perfectly square, and trellises for roses.
Because of the slope, only the top floor is visible when you approach from the street. You enter and a stair descends through what seems to be ground level to the living space, which in turn seems to hover above the garden, an upside-down sequence which further heightens its quality of apparition. You discover that everything in the house revolves around and sustains the central zone. Other aspects are special enough – the daring simplicity of the exterior and the refinement of the bedrooms would have been sufficient achievements for many architects – but here they support the main event.
All of which could add up to a familiar type of architecture, the uninhabitable masterpiece. Critics latched on to this possibility early, and a German architectural magazine asked, within a year of its completion: "Can One Live in Villa Tugendhat?" Greta and Fritz replied robustly that yes, you could. Their wishes were perfectly fulfilled, they said, and the design allowed different activities happily to co-exist. It was "austere and grand – not in a way that oppresses, but one that liberates". They spoke fondly of the way their children could play on the terrace, and of "sitting in the warm sun and looking out on the snow-covered landscape just as though we were in Davos". Mies later designed the Farnsworth House in Illinois, whose impracticalities drove its owner, Edith Farnsworth, to fury and lawsuits. In Brno, however, he achieved a miraculous union of art and life.
It did not last. Just over seven years after they moved in, the Tugendhats, who were Jewish, foresaw the approach of the Nazis and left for Switzerland, and then Venezuela. When they arrived, the Nazis appropriated the house and rented it out to the Messerschmitt aircraft company. They took the timber lining of the dining alcove and reinstalled it in the town's Gestapo headquarters. Shockwaves from allied bombs blew out the glass walls. The Soviet army took it and stabled horses among the exquisite veneers. After the war, it became a ballet studio, a rehabilitation centre for children with spinal defects and a guest house for the government. In 1992 the Czech and Slovak leaders met here to agree the division of their country. The house was a bubble in time as well as space and Greta's "completely special calm" was engulfed by the tumult of its period.
Its story is too good to go unnoticed by novelists, and it has not: Simon Mawer's 2009 Booker-shortlisted The Glass Room is a lightly fictionalised account of the Tugendhats and their house. Its descriptions of the place are evocative, but nothing can compare with the real thing, which, thanks to the EU millions, is about as close to its original state as could be hoped for. The timber abducted by the Gestapo was rediscovered and returned, having meanwhile become the setting of a student cafeteria, and the vibrant red and green chairs with which Mies furnished the space have been reinstalled. It is also different – it is no longer a private house for a highly privileged couple (which led a snarky critic to call it "modernist snobbery… the renewal of fancy baroque palaces, the seat of a new financial aristocracy") but a three-dimensional artwork and museum piece to be visited by the public.
Brno is a town whose location and identity most Britons, maybe even Observer readers, would be hard put to describe. Yet it has had a way of compressing a lot of history into its locality (rather, one is tempted to say, as it compresses a lot of sounds into its consonant-heavy name). The battle of Austerlitz took place just outside the town; Gregor Mendel invented modern genetics in the town's Abbey of St Thomas and Sigmund Freud was born in the region. In the 1920s the most optimistic time in Czechoslovakia's short life, it was a leading centre of modern architecture, several years ahead of London, for example. The vitality of that time has not returned, but in the Villa Tugendhat something of its spirit lives on.
-
More on this story
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Villa Tugendhat, Brno, Czech Republic – in pictures
A look inside the recently restored Mies van der Rohe 'glass villa' – the world's first steel-framed house
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