AAI Lecture Review - Investigating Materiality: Re-restoring Mies’ Villa Tugendhat in Brno

Title: Investigating Materiality: Re-restoring Mies' Villa Tugendhat in Brno

Speaker: Iveta Cerna

Venue: Synge Theatre, Trinity College Dublin

Date:10 November 2010

Edward R Ford wrote "There have always been two Mies ... the European Mies, who did many projects and built little, and ... the American Mies, who built one major building a year from 1950 until his death. The European buildings were irregular,assymmetrical, fragmented and touched by expressionism and De Stijl; the American buildings were regular, symmetrical, complete and recalled the work of Schinkel."

The Villa Tugendhat in Brno is one of the former, and occupies a position in the Mies canon that is worthy of discussion. The great bluffer's standard criticism of art is that, when in doubt, the labelling of something as a "transitional piece" is relatively hard to dispute and implies a knowledge of the artist's entire oeuvre; and yet, there is a good argument to say that the Villa at Brno is just that.

Ford's quote regarding the European and American Mies is perhaps most aptly embodied by two different projects separated by twenty eight years: the Brick Country House project of 1923 and the Farnsworth House of 1951.
The Brick Country House embodies many of Ford's descriptions: irregular, assymmetrical ... and unbuilt. Composed of freestanding brick walls, and with a plan that Colin Davies compares to Theo van Doesburg's Rhythm of a Russian Dance, the Brick Country House is the clear progenitor of Mies' Wolfe House in Gubin [1927] and has a notable material influence on the Lange and Ester Houses in Krefeld [1928].

Against this material similarity with the Brick Country House, the Lange House's construction method - finished just two years before Villa Tugendhat, it should be remembered - is more of a hybrid than one would originally suspect, given its monolithic brick walls. The structure of the floors and roof is composed of steel beams, which support a deck of tiles and concrete; there is even an interesting steel X-brace concealed in the set-back wall of the second floor.

The bookending Farnsworth House, in comparison, is incredibly resolved and still. There are no structural tricks; the dignity and the rigour of the project come before inventiveness.

Between Mies's European brick houses and the Farnsworth House, and yet on both timeline and geography heavily loaded to the European end of the scale, come three projects whose composition and approach attest to there existing a certain 'transitional period' as referred to above: the German pavilion at Barcelona, the Villa Tugendhat at Brno and the Villa Hubbe [unbuilt].

There are certain similarities in these three projects which mark them as siblings, yet there's also a marked difference - a progression? - in terms of their planning. The Villa Tugendhat is particularly noteworthy, as it takes up the material extravagance preluded in Barcelona with a more static plan than the exploded right-angles of the pavilion. That the Tugendhat plan is inarguably more prosaic than Barcelona reflects that the latter never really had any program to house; Tugendhat was, on the other hand, a family home, as Iveta Cerna's lecture was able to prove.

The beauty of the lecture came from the fact that it dealt with one building; to be able to focus on just one project, and a project that many – if not most – of the audience were familiar with, was enthralling.
The wealth of hitherto unseen images – the colour images which gave a glimpse of the opulence and luxury of the materials used by Mies, the family shots of the Tugendhat children sitting with their feet on the radiator pipes, later photographs taken from the period when the house was used as a school of dance – were revelatory in a small way; most people are used to a familiar black and white view of the house taken from the garden. Certainly, most images of Mies’ houses are absolutely bereft of human figures, and it was delightful to see photographs of the house not just inhabited, but absolutely filled ... and with children, rather than self-conscious adults.

The way that the history of the house and its owners was sketched out by Ms Cerna went far beyond an architectural case study: we were told how the Tugendhats used their Swiss connections to escape from Czechoslovakia and avoid the German invasion, and how Russian Cavalry units used the house as a stables while they were sweeping across the country towards Berlin in the closing days of the war.

In the aftermath of the war the house underwent many changes of use, something that marks a building, even to those who have no knowledge of its design or history, as worthwhile and well-built. Charmingly, it hosted a school of dance, and later on became a clinic for children with spinal problems. The adoption of the Villa Tugendhat as home by these institutions, and especially the photographs shown by Ms Cerna from these eras, for once allowed the building to exist in the background, rather than the foreground.

[As an aside, these photographs and the evidence they offered of a mass inhabitation of the house, made one realize just how vast and spacious the villa really was. One of the criticisms of the Tugendhat house at the time was that it cost roughly twenty times the amount a normal house in Brno would have cost to construct – the temptation to blame that on Mies’ lavish taste in materials can be indulged, but it is also worth remembering that the clients were an incredibly rich family used to living at the highest of standards.]

The ongoing renovation and refurbishment of the Villa Tugendhat formed the final part of the lecture. As an UNESCO World Heritage Site, the restoration is being painstakingly documented, and one of the compliments offered to Ms Cerna’s team was that they are not reticent about revealing where they have mis-stepped, so that future efforts can learn from, rather than repeat, their mistakes.

HL

Links:

Docomomo International: http://www.docomomo.com/

Docomomo Ireland: http://www.docomomo.ie/

Villa Tugendhat: http://www.tugendhat.eu/en/