Tugendhat House

Tugendhat House stands in Brno in the Czech Republic, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe together with Lilly Reich for the wealthy Jewish industrialist Fritz Tugendhat and his wife Greta, with construction beginning in 1928 and finishing in 1930. The house is widely regarded as a pioneering prototype of European modern architecture, its innovative iron structural framework freeing the interior from load-bearing walls and enabling the open, flowing living spaces that became a hallmark of Mies's later work, embodying the principle he later summarized as less is more. A glass curtain wall frames views toward Brno's Spilberk Castle, and two of its windows retract completely into the floor, while a freestanding wall of brown-gold onyx quarried in Morocco's Atlas Mountains provides one of the house's few notes of material luxury inside an otherwise minimalist scheme; the house was also fitted with an early air conditioning system, then a considerable technical novelty for a private residence. Mies and Reich also designed furniture specifically for the house, including the Tugendhat and Brno chairs, both of which entered wider production and remain in use today. UNESCO inscribed the house on the World Heritage List in 2001, and following an extensive restoration completed in 2012 it has operated as a public museum since 1994.