The dwelling machine

The dwelling machine names the modernist ambition behind the Landauer House: a home conceived as a frame for living rather than a traditional, stable structure. Rainer von Abt’s phrase, borrowed from Le Corbusier, first expresses a desire for lightness and openness. The house’s later transformations expose the vulnerability of that ideal: the same carefully designed rooms become instruments of racial classification, a place of medical treatment, and finally an architectural monument whose restoration cannot erase its accumulated histories.

The modernist ideal

During construction, a site foreman urges von Abt to provide decent load-bearing walls and stability. Von Abt rejects the premise. The house, he insists, must float in light, shimmer, and shine; stability is precisely what he does not want. The foreman sees the steel-girder frame as more appropriate to an office block or department store than a private residence, and remarks that the building looks more like a machine than a house. Von Abt accepts the comparison: that is what it is, a machine for living in.

When the foreman asks what he means, von Abt credits Le Corbusier rather than claiming originality, identifying the French phrase la machine à habiter. The reference places the Landauer House within an international modernist vocabulary. Its conception is not simply a preference for an unfamiliar construction method: the machine metaphor makes the house a designed environment for life, in deliberate contrast to the foreman’s idea of shelter as four stone walls.

That ideal is also stated as a refusal of national and religious labels. When someone suggests the house is intended to be a sensation, Viktor replies that it is meant to be a home. Asked about the project’s larger principle, he describes it as universal: neither Jewish, nor German, nor Czech, but international. The dwelling machine therefore joins a practical conception of the home to an aspiration that its design might exceed the identities that divide its owners’ world.

Building a home

The house and its child grow alongside one another, but on different clocks. The child’s development is marked by sudden milestones—the grasp of her hands, the focusing of her eyes, her first smile and laugh, and her recognition of Liesel and then Viktor. The building advances more slowly through steel beams, poured concrete, and the enclosure of space. Delays, shortages of materials and workers, arguments, and frustration stretch across summer and autumn. Viktor responds to the setbacks with unusual fatalism, saying that such things happen.

When the shell is completed in winter, there is no ceremony to match the child’s baptism or naming. The family climbs from the car to inspect a structure that initially looks less like a home than a warehouse for agricultural machinery or building materials, perched on a hillside. Inside, the rooms are unfinished and austere: rough dusty floors, plain white plaster, the smell of new cement and plaster, and single hundred-watt bulbs. The contrast between von Abt’s ambition to make the house shimmer and the bare construction site makes the ideal provisional; the building must become a home through use, not merely through its frame.

A design for living, and for control

The machine metaphor acquires a darker material counterpart when the house is converted into a Nazi biometric facility. Upstairs rooms become offices, the kitchens are adapted as a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. A former photographic darkroom is put to use, while curtains divide the Glass Room. The onyx wall stands before anthropometric equipment: scales, a vertical height-measuring stand, and a chair fitted with steel rulers above its headrest. The dining area is remade as a photographic studio, with drapes, lights, and a Rolleiflex camera. The Bösendorfer piano alone remains from the house’s previous life, incongruously restored by a Jewish piano tuner.

The conversion extends beyond the visible instruments. Heavy documentation machines, manufactured by Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH, arrive in the garage that once held the Landauers’ two cars. Soldiers carry files into the building, bringing documentary evidence gathered in Vienna. The house designed as an international home is thus reorganized as a site where people can be measured, photographed, and documented under racial categories. Its open, ordered modernism does not prevent coercive use; the rooms and equipment are redirected toward a political project that turns the organization of life into a system of classification.

Reuse, memory, and preservation

In a later period, the Landauer House serves as a children’s gymnasium. A newspaper correspondent describes its living room as a striking architectural space, with south-facing windows that flood it with light, two hundred and thirty square metres of room, and two glass walls overlooking the city and Špilas. The correspondent questions whether a building regarded as an architectural treasure should be used for children’s treatment, while acknowledging the importance of care for sick children. The dispute turns on competing uses of the same modernist space: preservation as a work of architecture and everyday service as a place for treatment.

For Tomáš, the gymnasium is not merely an institution occupying the house. He calls it the Glass Room, and the novel notes that the word he uses for “room” can also mean peace, tranquillity, or quiet. The Glass Room becomes, in his understanding, the Glass Tranquillity: a space of light and stillness, apparently detached from period and style, where he can be with Zdenka after work. He watches her dance classes there, finding relief in the children’s chatter and movement after treating children disabled by disease. The building’s new life is not only assigned by authorities or conservation policy; it is made through particular routines and attachments.

By 1990, the house has been fixed in time like a fossil. Repairs are poorly done; some original furniture is retrieved from the Moravian Museum and returned approximately to its former place, while updated bathroom fittings are ruined. Yet the Glass Room’s windowpanes are removed and plate glass restored, allowing the space to recover its full lucid splendour. Visitors arrive from fraternal Soviet states and, later, from abroad, including tourists and architecture students interested in von Abt’s place in modernism. The dwelling machine has become both a preserved object and a destination for people who encounter it through histories different from the Landauers’.

The novel’s treatment of the house makes its modernist promise inseparable from the question of who controls space and what life it is made to serve. A home imagined as universal can be appropriated by a racial bureaucracy; a glass-walled living room can become a laboratory and photographic studio, then a treatment space, then a heritage site. Restoration recovers light and architectural form, but the succession of uses remains part of what the house means. The dwelling machine is therefore not a timeless solution to living: its significance changes with the people, institutions, memories, and power that enter it.