Landauer House design commission

The Landauer House design commission turns a chance meeting in Venice between newlyweds Liesel Landauer and Viktor Landauer and architect Rainer von Abt into a concrete project: a modern family home conceived as an entire way of life. Its significance extends beyond the agreement itself. The house that emerges from the commission becomes a setting in which private domestic hopes, Nazi appropriation, later public use and the contested preservation of architectural heritage are made visible in the same rooms.

From Venice encounter to architectural proposal

The commission has its beginning in a second meeting. Rainer von Abt, first encountered by Liesel and Viktor during their honeymoon, invites them to a special presentation but keeps its purpose secret. In Venice, he leads them to an exhibition and points out his 1928 design for an Austrian pavilion. Its model, with transparent celluloid walls, chrome-like details and a reflecting pool, gives Viktor a clear glimpse of the architect’s modernist approach. Viktor recognizes that von Abt is an architect, and their acquaintance begins to take on a professional direction.

Von Abt describes himself as a disciple of Adolf Loos, whose work Viktor admires. He argues for uncluttered form and for glass, steel and concrete over the weight of brick and stone. Rather than enclosing people in what he calls caves, he wants to create a glass space in which they can live. Liesel hears the expression Glass Space for the first time. Viktor then turns the idea toward their own future, suggesting that von Abt might design one for them. The proposal joins an architectural ideal to a particular household: this is to be a home for Liesel and Viktor, not simply an abstract experiment in modern design.

A home conceived as a whole world

When von Abt later names the project the Landauer House, Liesel registers the change in its status. What she had understood as a house of imagination and possibility now has a concrete name. Von Abt describes his ambition as more expansive than designing a structure: he intends to work from the foundations through the interiors, windows, doorways, furnishings and fabrics. He promises not only a place to live but a way of life, and imagines the finished home as a work of art that will draw attention.

The exchange also places Liesel within the creative process. When she tells von Abt that she is pregnant, Viktor jokes that the achievement is hers and that his own part was brief. The shared moment makes the future family an immediate presence in the discussion. Liesel uses that intimacy to claim responsibility for choosing the interior: fabrics, flooring and furnishings. Von Abt assures her that the work will be collaborative and that he will build nothing she will not adore. The commission therefore brings together Viktor’s architectural enthusiasm, von Abt’s design ambition and Liesel’s stated authority over the home’s interior.

Contract and construction

The imaginative proposal becomes a formal undertaking through an agreement between Viktor and Liesel Landauer and Rainer von Abt. The brief specifies a two-storey family home with a basement and approximately 500 square metres of floor space, alongside a garage for a saloon car and separate servants’ quarters of 120 square metres. Preliminary plans are due within two months, with final plans by April 1929. Construction details are to be agreed jointly, while furnishings and fittings are to be decided over the following months; the designs remain subject to the Landauers’ final approval.

A banker’s draft drawn on the Živnostenská Banka is handed across the legal-office table, and the parties shake hands. The moment converts the imagined house into a paid commission and an enforceable plan. Its scale and carefully assigned stages make the Landauer House both a family project and a substantial architectural work. The agreement also preserves a role for the owners in decisions that will shape their daily surroundings rather than leaving the house wholly to its architect.

Construction unfolds alongside the growth of Liesel and Viktor’s baby. The child’s development is marked by changes such as grasping, focusing her eyes, smiling and recognizing her parents; the house advances more slowly through steel beams, poured concrete and the enclosure of space. Delays involving materials and the workforce bring arguments and frustration through summer and autumn. When the shell is finally complete in winter, there is no celebratory ceremony. It initially looks more like a warehouse than a home, and its rooms remain bare, dusty and lit by single bulbs. The commission’s ideal therefore takes shape through protracted material work, not in a single triumphant reveal.

The house beyond its commission

The house’s later uses expose how little a building’s function is secured by its original design. Under Nazi rule, the rooms are transformed into offices and laboratories, the basement prepared for an X-ray machine, and part of the Glass Room divided by curtains. The former dining area becomes a photographic studio; anthropometric equipment is set before the onyx wall, and Hollerith documentation machines arrive in the garage that once held Landauer cars. The piano remains, an incongruous remnant of the former home. The architecture commissioned as a modern family setting is thus repurposed to serve a regime’s biometric work.

In a later period the Landauer House serves as a children’s gymnasium, accommodating treatment for children with disabilities. A newspaper account identifies it as a notable work by von Abt, who fled to the United States in 1938, and describes its vast 230-square-metre living room, glass walls and view across the city to the Špilas. The building’s public use raises a tension between its architectural distinction and its value as a place where children receive care. Neither its original domestic purpose nor its later designation as a masterpiece determines how the space must be used.

In 1990, repairs and the return of some furniture from the Moravian Museum seek to restore the house’s appearance, though the work is uneven and updated bathroom fittings are ruined. Replacing the Glass Room’s panes with plate glass restores the space to what the narrative calls its full lucid splendour. Visitors arrive as the house becomes an architectural destination, and Marie Delmas comes from Paris after recognizing a photograph of the house as an image from her memory. The commission’s legacy is therefore not simply the survival of a modernist design: the house persists through successive, conflicting uses, while its rooms continue to carry traces of lives and histories that its original contract could not foresee.