Commissioning and construction of Landauer House

The commissioning and construction of Landauer House begin with Viktor Landauer’s invitation to Rainer von Abt to design a Glass Space for him and Liesel Landauer. The result is not simply a modernist family home: its transparent, light-filled living room becomes the defining image of the house, while the building’s later conversion into a biometric research centre and children’s gymnasium exposes how radically architecture can be turned to purposes its first inhabitants could not have imagined.

The commission takes shape

Rainer von Abt first describes his architectural ideal through a rejection of the enclosing, inherited house. He praises glass, steel and concrete, and imagines taking human beings out of the cave and suspending them in a glass space. Liesel hears the expression Glass Space for the first time. Viktor, looking from his wife back to the architect, then proposes that von Abt design one for them. The idea begins as conversation, but already joins an architectural vision to the Landauers’ particular domestic future.

On the hillside, von Abt announces that he will build the house upside down. His declaration gives the design an air of deliberate strangeness before its practical terms are settled. After a brief argument among the three, the project passes from imaginative proposal to legal commitment. Viktor and Liesel sign an agreement with Herr Doktor Architekt Abt, Rainer, who asks them to omit the title von. The commission specifies a two-storey family house with a basement and approximately five hundred square metres of floor area, alongside a garage for a saloon car and separate servants’ quarters of one hundred and twenty square metres. Preliminary plans are due in two months and final plans by April 1929; construction details are to be agreed jointly, and the Landauers retain final approval over furnishings and fittings.

The formality of the agreement is made tangible in the legal office: pens move across the page, a banker’s draft drawn on the Živnostenská Banka changes hands, and the commission is sealed by a handshake. Viktor’s is solemn and businesslike; von Abt’s with Liesel is warm and uses both hands. The contrast marks the project as both a business contract and a personal undertaking. What had been a figment in the architect’s mind is now set to become a house.

From excavated hillside to glass room

In March, as the ground thaws into mud, the building site is cut into the hillside. A mechanical excavator gouges the earth until the slope resembles the scarred landscape of the Tagliamento during the war. The excavation exposes rust-coloured, rock-hard soil; a plank-lined ramp stabilizes the descent. The scale of the earthworks surprises the foreman, who remarks that the site looks more suited to a factory than a private home.

The foundations make the industrial character unmistakable. Concrete piles are driven into the hard-pan and a concrete base is laid; the steel columns arrive from Gossen in Berlin. The vertical supports are not ordinary posts but cruciform pillars made from four angle-beams riveted back to back, while I-beams form the joists. Riveting hammers and steel clangour interrupt the calm of Blackfield Road. The narrative stresses how unprecedented this method seems for a private residence, placing the domestic project at the edge of engineering and modern industrial construction.

The house and the Landauers’ child grow at different speeds. Ottilie’s development is marked by first gestures and recognitions, while the building advances through beams, poured concrete and the gradual enclosure of space. Delays over materials and the workforce stretch across summer and autumn, bringing argument and frustration before the problems are resolved. Viktor’s admission that such things happen offers no grand explanation: construction, like family life, proceeds through interruption as well as design.

The decisive transformation comes when glaziers lift broad sheets of glass into place between the concrete floors. The previously empty volume becomes the Glass Room. Liesel and Viktor stand inside what seems to them a palace of light: illumination rebounds from chrome pillars, walls, garden dew and glass, making the room feel like the interior of a crystal. Liesel describes the sensation as freedom and possibility, and credits von Abt with creating a masterpiece. The room makes the architect’s abstract Glass Space physically inhabitable.

Finishing the house and its ideal

Completion is a process of turning a construction shell into a lived interior. Through autumn, deliveries arrive on Blackfield Road as workers in grey overalls carry packages inside and neighbours watch from nearby gardens. Doors are hung, bathrooms tiled in white to the ceiling, and floors laid. In the Glass Room, polished onyx slabs are installed as a wall. Their amber and honey-coloured veins resemble a distant prehistoric landscape; the stone blocks, reflects and warms the light, then glows red when the setting sun shines directly on it from over the Špilas fortress.

The room’s materials make transparency more complex than an unbroken ideal of exposure. Glass admits the view and floods the interior with light, while the onyx partition holds and redirects that light, changing its appearance with the hour. Ivory-coloured linoleum adds another surface of reflected illumination: daylight makes it seem almost translucent, and evening lights cast reflections into its depth. The contrast between the upstairs rooms, enclosed as zimmer—rooms or boxes—and the open raum below gives the house’s spatial ambition a verbal as well as architectural form.

The project reaches its aesthetic culmination in the judgment of perfection: proportion, illumination, mood and manner appear to converge in beauty made manifest. Yet the house’s first completion is not a simple, ceremonial triumph. When the outer shell is finished, there is no baptism or naming; the Landauers approach it with apprehension, and from outside it looks more like a warehouse than a home. Its identity emerges through the interior and its fittings, not from the bare envelope alone. The housewarming later turns the private achievement into a public occasion, with von Abt arriving by air from Berlin and the guests treating the architect’s appearance as part of the modern spectacle.

The house remade

The construction’s later history reverses its original purpose. Under Nazi occupation, Landauer House is transformed into a biometric research centre. Bedrooms become offices, the kitchens are adapted as a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. Another basement room, already equipped as a photographic darkroom, is put to institutional use. Curtains divide the Glass Room, while anthropometric equipment—scales, a height stand, callipers and a specially fitted chair—occupies the space before the onyx wall. The dining area becomes a photographic studio, with lighting arranged around its curved panelling and a Rolleiflex camera set on a tripod. The Bösendorfer piano remains, incongruously, from the former household.

The change is not only a substitution of furniture. A garage that had been designed for the Landauers’ cars receives large Hollerith machines and becomes more like a newspaper print shop, while soldiers carry boxes of files into the main building. The house’s carefully planned spaces are reorganized for measurement, photography and documentation. Its light-filled openness does not prevent the building from being used to classify and expose people; the very instruments and procedures installed there make that reversal concrete.

In a later political order, the building serves as a children’s gymnasium. A city newspaper presents the Landauer House as an architectural treasure in the Blackfield district, overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre, and identifies it as Rainer Abt’s masterpiece and his last European work before he fled to the United States in 1938. The article acknowledges the tension in using an architectural landmark for children’s treatment rather than preserving it as an exhibit. In everyday use, the Glass Room becomes a place where a physiotherapy gymnasium operates; Tomáš calls it the Glass Room and finds in its light and stillness a tranquillity distinct from the building’s official history.

By 1990 the house is described as fixed in time and space, like a fossil. Repairs have been poor, and restored bathroom fittings have themselves been ruined, while some original furniture has been retrieved from the Moravian Museum and returned approximately to its former positions. The Glass Room’s panes are removed and replaced with plate glass, restoring its lucid splendour. Visitors arrive in small groups, first largely from fraternal Soviet states and later including tourists and architecture students. The building thus passes from private home to instrument of state power, from treatment space to heritage site. Its construction matters not only because it realizes von Abt’s modernist vision, but because its successive uses reveal that architecture cannot secure a single, permanent meaning for the space it creates.