Viktor Landauer—Rainer von Abt professional partnership

Viktor Landauer—Rainer von Abt professional partnership transformed an invitation to design a family home into an enduring architectural collaboration. Viktor supplied the commission and a precise sense of its site and domestic needs; von Abt brought an ideal of enclosing space through glass, steel, and concrete. Their shared work took material form in the Landauer House, but the building’s later conversions reveal how little control its creators could retain over the uses and meanings of the space they made.

A commission founded on competing visions

Von Abt first described his architectural ideal as a Glass Space: an alternative to the enclosing, cave-like structures he associated with conventional building. He drew constructions on a tablecloth, imagined towers rising into the sky, and praised glass, steel, and concrete over the weight of brick and stone. Viktor responded by proposing that von Abt design a Glass Space for the couple. The suggestion turned an abstract architectural vision into a specific commission.

At their next meeting, Viktor summoned von Abt to the couple’s suite ostensibly for cocktails, but in fact to discuss the proposed house. Von Abt called it a difficult proposition. Viktor compared the task to building a motor car, reasoning that an architect should find a house straightforward to make. Von Abt countered that a car was built for a market, whereas this house would be an opportunity to realize an individual vision. The exchange established the partnership’s productive tension: Viktor approached the project as a client and industrialist accustomed to practical outcomes, while von Abt insisted that the house should be more than a functional product.

Viktor nevertheless made the architect’s freedom concrete by asking him to prepare sketches of the kind of space he wished to enclose. He described the site as a steep hill overlooking Město, with Lužánky Park below and the city spread out in front. He also explained that the place had two names, Austrian and Czech, giving von Abt a setting already shaped by the region’s overlapping identities. The commission would therefore answer to both a highly particular landscape and an ambitious conception of modern living.

Contract and construction

The partnership was formalized through a legal agreement between Viktor and Liesel Landauer and Rainer von Abt, who asked that the title “von” be omitted. The plan specified a two-storey family home with a basement and an area of approximately five hundred square metres, plus a garage for a saloon car and separate servants’ quarters measuring one hundred and twenty square metres. Preliminary plans were due within two months, and final plans by April 1929. Construction details were to be settled by mutual consent, while the Landauers retained final approval over the designs for furnishings and fittings. A banker’s draft from Živnostenská Banka passed across the table as the signatures made the imagined house an actual commission.

The work advanced alongside the growth of the Landauers’ baby. Steel beams were laid, concrete poured, and rooms enclosed, but materials and labour problems brought delays, arguments, and frustration through summer and autumn. Viktor’s response, “These things happen,” marked an unusual note of fatalism amid the practical difficulties. When the shell was finally complete that winter, there was no celebratory ceremony. The unfinished structure looked, at first, less like a home than a warehouse on the hillside: rough floors, white plaster, bare bulbs, and canvas standing in for the glass.

The empty interior made the design’s central problem visible. Von Abt showed where a partition would divide the sitting area from the library, and the choice of material became a point of contention. He insisted on onyx, though the Landauers found the gemstone extravagant and out of place. Von Abt had considered alabaster and travertine before settling on it as the room’s defining feature. He described its veining and honey-gold colour, comparing it to the hair of Liesel and their daughter, Ottilie. The partition was thus both a technical and aesthetic decision: it gave tangible form to von Abt’s claim that architecture could enclose space as a work of art, while its intimate association with the family made the design personal as well as spectacular.

A home remade by political power

The collaboration’s built achievement did not remain a private residence. After the Landauer family left in 1938, the house was transformed into a biometric research centre. Upstairs rooms became offices, the kitchens were converted into a laboratory, and a basement room was prepared for an X-ray machine. A photographic darkroom that had belonged to the original building was put to new use. Curtains divided the Glass Room, while anthropometric equipment gathered in front of the onyx wall: scales, a height-measuring stand, a chair fitted with steel rulers, and tables laid out with callipers. The dining area became a photographic studio, with drapes screening its curved Macassar panelling and a Rolleiflex camera set on a tripod.

The former garage, once intended for the Landauers’ two motor cars, received large Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH machines and boxes of files. The house’s carefully composed openness was appropriated for measuring, photographing, and documenting people. Its piano, incongruous among the new equipment, remained from the earlier life of the building; a Jewish tuner restored the sound of the Bösendorfer. This conversion sharply altered the purpose of von Abt’s spaces. The architecture continued to organize bodies and activity, but now served an institution rather than a family, and its modernist interior was made to accommodate systems of racial classification.

Under Communist rule, the Glass Room was repurposed again, this time as a children’s physiotherapy gymnasium. Tomáš called it the Glass Room, a name that carried a second sense in Czech: the word for a room could also mean peace, quiet, or tranquillity. For him, the gymnasium could become a place of light and stillness after work, and a space where he met Zdenka. Its use was not solely clinical: Zdenka held dance classes there, and Tomáš sometimes watched the children practice. The room that had been designed for domestic life and later reorganized for measurement thus acquired another everyday function, shaped by care, work, and private relationships.

Heritage, memory, and the house’s afterlives

The building’s status as a hospital facility became the subject of public debate when a correspondent and a member of the State Committee for Architectural Heritage examined its history. The report presented the Landauer House as a landmark of modernist architecture, identified it as Rainer Abt’s masterpiece and his last European work before his flight to the United States in 1938, and questioned whether an architectural treasure should continue serving as a children’s gymnasium. It also recorded the physical features through which the collaboration remained legible: the two glass walls of the approximately two-hundred-and-thirty-square-metre living room, the view across the city to the Špilas, chrome supports, cream linoleum, and the onyx partition. The original plate-glass windows had been destroyed by a wartime bomb and replaced with smaller panes, though the mechanism for lowering two window frames into the basement was reportedly still functional.

Heritage could not be separated from contested memories of the building’s survival. Josef Laník, once its caretaker and by then a local District Committee official, recalled maintaining it during the war and defending it with his sister during liberation before handing it over to Soviet forces. A later gathering at the house brought Liesel face to face with Laník. While he spoke about looking after the building, the bomb, and liberation, the crowd around her made the Glass Room feel oppressive rather than open. She told Hana that Laník had always unsettled her and that she thought he had spied on her. Hana connected his later official standing to the broader political history of the country. The scene made preservation inseparable from the people who had occupied, watched, defended, and repurposed the place.

By 1990, restoration had repaired the house imperfectly. Some original furniture returned from the Moravian Museum, while updated bathroom fittings were ruined; most decisively, the small windowpanes were replaced with plate glass, restoring the Glass Room’s expansive clarity. Visitors came in organized groups and as tourists or architecture students, encountering a building increasingly treated as an object of architectural history. Marie Delmas arrived from Paris shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain after recognizing the house in a photograph in a book on modern architecture. At the building she was told that the Landauer family had left in 1938 and that the house belonged to the city and was now a museum. Yet the remembered home exceeded that official designation: the piano’s chord seemed to make the space vibrate with children’s sounds and adults’ crying. The partnership’s legacy therefore rests not only in the modernist form Viktor commissioned and von Abt designed, but also in the changing lives and conflicting histories that the house continued to hold.