Villa Landauer is both a landmark of functionalist architecture and a contested place of memory. Its expansive Glass Room, plate-glass walls, and onyx partition embody an ideal of light and openness, yet war breaks the glass, political power changes the building’s use, and later preservation efforts risk turning a lived-in place into a monument to a past declared finished. The house’s history is not simply the story of a masterpiece surviving: it is the struggle over what survival means, who gets to use the building, and whose memories its public identity will contain.

Design and Setting

Built for the Landauer family in the late 1920s, the house stands in the Blackfield district, a residential area overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre. Architect Rainer von Abt designed a home whose architecture makes space and light central to domestic life. The later newspaper account describes a living room of 230 square metres for a family of four, with two glass walls and a view across the city toward Špilas. The scale makes the room seem less like a conventional interior than a sheltered prospect over the city.

The room’s materials sharpen that impression. Chrome pillars support the structure; cream linoleum gives the floor a spare, functional finish; and a partition of pure onyx slabs divides the sitting area from the so-called library. The onyx, made from a single piece of stone from the Atlas Mountains, introduces one of the few strong colours into an interior otherwise composed of white, ivory, mirrored chrome, and transparent glass. Its pale gold and amber veins remain visible as the observer follows their sinuous patterns. The house’s modernism is therefore not an absence of material presence: the onyx wall makes the architecture’s restraint tangible and particular.

The original furniture was specially designed for the house, but much of it disappeared; some surviving specimens were held in the Moravian Museum. The building itself remained largely intact. Its original plate-glass windows, however, were destroyed by a wartime bomb blast and later replaced with smaller panes. In the earlier arrangement, two window frames could be lowered at the touch of a button into the basement, making the transition between the Glass Room and the garden almost disappear. The mechanism reportedly still worked even after more practical windows had taken the place of the original single panes. The house thus preserves both the evidence of an ambitious design and the practical traces of its alteration.

War and Physical Survival

During the November bombing of Město, Laník and his sister shelter in the house’s basement. Bombs fall through the fog without warning, and an explosion tears through the city, damaging churches, homes, shops, and part of the railway station. A bomb lands in the garden beside Villa Landauer. The blast shakes the building to its roots, cracks plaster and cement, and shatters the Glass Room’s plate-glass windows, the transparent walls through which Rainer von Abt had joined interior and exterior.

The difference between the actual impact and the possible one gives the house’s survival its precarious force. The bomb falls into wet earth, leaving a muddy crater where the silver birch had stood. Had its trajectory differed slightly, it might have struck the terrace, pierced the ferroconcrete and the Glass Room, and exploded in the basement. The narrator sets the building’s celebrated perfection against that chance: five hundred pounds of explosive could have destroyed both the construction and the people sheltering below it. The house is not untouched by history; its survival is the outcome of a near miss, while its broken windows remain a material record of the violence around it.

After the raid, Laník follows Viktor Landauer’s parting instruction and conceals the onyx wall behind a partition of wood and plaster. He does not know what use he might make of the stone after the war, imagining, perhaps, hundreds or thousands of ashtrays. The gesture protects something valuable, but it also hides a defining feature of the house from view. Preservation here begins not as a public project but as a caretaker’s practical and uncertain response to danger and possible loss.

From Home to Public Institution

The house’s uses change with the political and social order. In the account published decades later, a member of the State Committee for Architectural Heritage calls it the Landauer family’s former home and identifies it as Rainer von Abt’s European masterpiece, the last of his European work before he fled to the United States in 1938. The article praises the building’s architectural distinction while also explaining that it is then serving as a children’s gymnasium for a hospital physiotherapy department. Its writer acknowledges the importance of treatment for sick children but questions whether a building of such value should be used in this way.

Tomáš resists that heritage argument. To him, the building’s present function matters more than its former identity: it is valuable as a gymnasium, he says, but impossible as a house and worthless as a museum. He regards museums as memorials to things that have ended, and treats their claims to preserve the past as a form of fantasy. His position brings the dispute into focus without resolving it. The heritage committee sees a work of architecture at risk of being overlooked; Tomáš sees a functioning space whose value lies in its current service, not in turning it into a display.

Laník’s history of the building complicates both positions. As its former caretaker, he recalls the Landauers’ life there as indecent luxury, remembers maintaining the property through the bombing, and claims that he and his sister defended it against the Nazis before handing it over safe and sound to the Soviet forces. Now a local District Committee official, he hopes the house will open to the public so that ordinary people can enjoy what once belonged to a privileged few. His account turns the house’s history into an argument about access and social ownership, but the novel also places that confident public narrative beside Liesel’s private suspicion that Laník used to spy on her. The building’s keeper is therefore not a neutral guide to its past.

Memory, Access, and the Meaning of Preservation

When Liesel returns, the Glass Room is crowded with people listening to a speech by the chief of the urban planning department about the house’s place in European architecture. She has never felt claustrophobic there before, but now the press of the gathering makes the room oppressive; she asks Hana to take her out to the terrace. The reversal matters: the house once celebrated for light and spaciousness can become constricting when an official occasion fills it with visitors and interpretation. Its public recognition does not automatically restore the intimacy of the home.

In the same return, Hana embraces Ottilie and asks to look at her. Liesel, though blind, imagines Hana holding the younger woman at arm’s length, placing her in perspective against a past that seems remote after thirty years and a war. The meeting opens a sudden inward vista: Liesel can see, in memory, Martin and Ottilie playing on the terrace, Viktor in the library with a newspaper, and Hana beside her looking out over the garden. At the end of that remembered scene, Katalin appears at the bottom of the garden, walking up the path hand in hand with Marika. The architecture holds this remembered domestic life, but the recollection also exceeds the house’s walls: the Glass Room becomes a frame through which a lost household and its relationships return.

Another encounter exposes the gap between the building as a heritage object and the people who must live with its history. When Marie asks what happened to the Landauer family, Milada replies that they left in 1938 and that the house now belongs to the city and is a museum. Yet Marie’s experience contradicts the idea of a finished, inert monument. The house feels vibrant and alive to her, like a chord sounding from the piano behind the onyx wall and growing louder with time, resonant with the noise of children and the crying of adults. She has to steady herself and sit down. The building’s history cannot be made into a single clean account: family absence, public possession, care, childhood, grief, and the survival of material objects continue to sound together.

Architectural Heritage and Living Use

Villa Landauer’s transformations prevent either architectural preservation or practical reuse from serving as a complete answer to what the building is for. The museum proposal recognizes the house as a significant work of modernism, but Tomáš’s objection insists that present use is not merely an obstacle to historical value. The children’s gymnasium places the building in service to people who need treatment; the museum would make its design available to a wider public, while also changing the character of that access. The novel keeps the tension visible rather than assigning the building one definitive purpose.

The house’s physical details make that tension concrete. Its plate glass is lost and replaced; its lowering windows remain as an operable mechanism; its onyx wall is hidden and later seen again; its spacious room can host both a public speech and a private return of memory. These alterations do not simply mark damage or restoration. They show how architecture passes through human use, political ownership, and changing accounts of the past. Villa Landauer endures not as a pristine object outside history, but as a place whose meanings are repeatedly made and contested by the people who enter it.