Villa Tugendhat
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How it came to be
Fritz and Greta Tugendhat, a Jewish couple from wealthy Brno industrial families, commissioned a house designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich. Building began in the summer of 1929, took 14 months and was finished in 1930. Steel beams support reinforced concrete slabs, so the living area is one open space divided only by walls of onyx and rare tropical wood. The house had air conditioning, and a mechanism in the basement lowered the large windows into the floor.
In 1938, shortly before the Munich Agreement, the family fled Nazi persecution to Switzerland and then Venezuela, and never lived in the house again. The Gestapo confiscated it in 1939, and from 1942 it served as offices for the Messerschmitt aircraft works. In April 1945 a Soviet unit was quartered there and damaged the floor. After the war it became city property and was used, among other things, as a children's physiotherapy centre.
On 26 August 1992 Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar signed in the villa the document dividing Czechoslovakia into the Czech and Slovak republics. The house opened as a museum in 1994 and was inscribed in 2001. It was restored from February 2010 to February 2012 and reopened that March.
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