Landauer Villa is both a modernist residence and the novel’s most consequential changing space. Built for the Landauer family on a hillside above Město, it gathers family life around the Glass Room, a luminous expanse of glass, onyx, wood, and chrome. Over time, the house is emptied, abandoned, seized, repurposed, and restored. Its clear surfaces promise light and rational order, yet they witness private departures, racial classification, institutional care, and the uncertain work of memory.

Design and domestic beginnings

The house grows alongside the Landauer family. Its construction proceeds through steel beams, poured concrete, and the enclosing of space, while the baby grows through grasping, recognition, a first smile, and laughter. The parallel is not seamless: shortages of materials and workers delay the building through summer and autumn, bringing arguments and frustration. When the shell is finally complete in winter, there is no ceremony to mark the occasion. Seen from outside, it resembles a warehouse perched on the hillside; inside, bare concrete, white plaster, and single bulbs make it feel unfinished rather than celebratory.

The finished house is associated with Rainer von Abt’s modernist vision. Its defining room has two glass walls and a view across the city toward Špilas; the broad, south-facing windows bring in light, while chrome pillars support the structure. In a later public account, the living room is described as 230 square metres for a family of four. The room’s scale and openness are striking, but the house is not merely an architectural display: it is where the family’s daily life, furniture, music, and relationships give the abstract design a human use.

The novel makes the Villa’s materials part of its emotional vocabulary. Onyx and Macassar wood divide areas without closing them off; glass admits light and exposes the interior to the world outside. The combination makes the home seem at once lucid and vulnerable. The house’s carefully composed rationality is repeatedly tested by the unruly events of human life, beginning with the family’s own changes and eventually by political forces it cannot exclude.

Departure and the house left behind

On the Landauers’ departure, the Glass Room is nearly empty. The piano remains in the space behind the onyx wall, along with a couple of chairs; the rest has gone. The room recalls its own beginning, when the builders and decorators had left but the furniture had not yet arrived. What remains is the architecture itself: light, white space, gleaming chrome, the onyx wall, and the curved Macassar partition. The scene sets the room’s cool, rational design against the feelings attached to it by those who have lived there.

Viktor insists that the house is still theirs: they have not sold or given it away, and Liesel’s parents will watch over it, as will Laník and his sister. Liesel’s sorrow is not answered by this practical reassurance. The Villa is not only property that might later be reclaimed; it is the home from which she is being separated. In the rain, the windows blur and refract the light, making the image of the house resemble memory already altered by time and feeling.

The convoy leaves by Blackfield Road on Friday the seventeenth. Viktor and Liesel travel with the children in the first car, Katalin follows with Marika and the luggage, and Oskar and Hana bring up the rear. The new traffic rules require them to drive on the right. As the cars leave the city, Liesel sees the Villa from the aircraft and recognizes its low shape on the hill, the blank glass wall and the Glass Room. Her view from above converts the clean geometry of von Abt’s design into a painful farewell: she weeps at the possibility that she may never see the house again and at a future made uncertain by flight.

Seizure and institutional transformation

Under Nazi occupation, the house’s rooms are reorganized for biometric and racial research. Upstairs rooms become offices; the kitchens are converted into a laboratory; a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. A photographic darkroom that belonged to the house’s previous life is put to new use. Curtains divide the Glass Room, and equipment for measuring bodies is placed before the onyx wall: scales, a height-measuring stand, and a chair fitted with suspended steel rulers. The curve of the Macassar dining-area panelling becomes a photographic backdrop, lit for the camera.

The surviving piano makes the transformation especially stark. The rest of the interior is being equipped for measurement and documentation, but the Bösendorfer remains, its sound restored by a Jewish piano tuner hired for the task. The house’s domestic and artistic history is not simply erased; remnants of it are absorbed into the new institution, where they sit uneasily beside instruments designed to classify people.

Documentation equipment follows. Large machines made by Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH are unloaded into the garage that once held the Landauer motor cars. Their black steel and Bakelite bodies, brass nameplates, and outsized mechanisms turn the space into something like a printing works. Soldiers carry boxes of files into the building. The Villa has become an operational centre in which rooms, furnishings, and equipment serve the collection and processing of evidence about human bodies and identities. Its modern appearance does not protect it from political appropriation; the same ordered spaces that once served a family now help administer a violent racial order.

State use and the Glass Room’s afterlives

In a later period, Landauer Villa serves as a children’s gymnasium. A newspaper account identifies it as an architectural treasure in the Blackfield district, among bourgeois villas overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre. The account traces its construction to the Landauer family and calls it von Abt’s masterpiece, while also noting that he fled to the United States in 1938. The article’s central tension is practical as well as aesthetic: children need treatment and a healthy environment, but the use of a celebrated modernist building as a gymnasium raises questions about how architectural heritage should be treated.

For Tomáš, the gymnasium remains the Glass Room. The Czech word pokoj can mean both a room and peace, quiet, or tranquillity; the name therefore carries a second sense for him, the Glass Tranquillity. The state-owned space becomes part of his private life with Zdenka. She holds dance classes there for extra money, an irregular arrangement tolerated because some dancers are children of party officials. Tomáš watches the girls practise, their movements sometimes ungainly and sometimes beautiful, and finds relief in their chatter from his work with children disabled by disease. The room’s public institutional function and its intimate use coexist without fully reconciling.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Villa is repaired, though badly, and some original furniture is retrieved from the Moravian Museum and returned approximately to its former place. Updated bathroom fittings are ruined, while the Glass Room’s windowpanes are removed and replaced with plate glass, restoring the space’s lucid splendour. The building becomes a destination for visiting groups from the fraternal Soviet states and, later, tourists and architecture students interested in von Abt’s place in modernist history. Restoration makes the room legible again as architecture, but it cannot restore the life that once filled it.

Memory, preservation, and contested belonging

The Villa’s sequence of uses turns it into a record of changing authority. A family’s home becomes an instrument of Nazi racial research, then a children’s treatment space, then a restored monument visited for its architectural importance. These transitions are not simply changes in ownership or function: they alter which bodies may inhabit the rooms and what the rooms are made to do. The former dining area can become a photographic studio; the garage can house documentation machinery; the Glass Room can be at once a designed living space, a gymnasium, and a place of private encounter.

The house’s apparent transparency sharpens rather than resolves that history. Glass offers light and a view across Město, but it also makes the interior visible and exposed. During the family’s flight, the windows become a surface on which rain and grief meet; under the biometric institution, curtains partition the room and photographic equipment directs the gaze. The Villa’s openness is therefore never neutral. It can serve an ideal of modern living, facilitate observation, or become the focus of longing for those forced away.

By the time it is restored, the Villa exists as a fixed object of preservation, while the people and lives that gave it meaning have been scattered or transformed. Its return to architectural splendour cannot undo its seizure, its departure scenes, or its later institutional uses. The house endures not as a stable refuge but as a contested space where design, political power, care, desire, and memory repeatedly meet.