Landauer House onyx wall

The Landauer House onyx wall is the costly, luminous partition at the heart of the Glass Room, dividing its sitting area from its library. Rainer von Abt imagined it as the modern house’s pièce de résistance; once installed, the stone’s reflected light made it seem almost alive. Its significance changes with the house around it: first an extravagant domestic choice entangled with private desire, then a backdrop to Nazi racial measurement, and ultimately part of a space restored as an architectural treasure.

Design and Dispute

During a walk through the unfinished house, von Abt stood in the large living space and indicated where the partition would stand, separating the sitting area from the library. The design decision had already become contentious. He insisted on onyx, while the choice struck others as absurdly extravagant: a gemstone associated with cameo brooches and decorative boxes, not an entire wall. Von Abt had considered alabaster and travertine before settling on the stone, whose intricate veining and honey-gold colour he described with characteristic theatricality.

His appeal to Liesel Landauer made the design personal as well as architectural. He compared the stone’s colour to a young girl’s hair, then to their daughter’s. Viktor Landauer saw the current of sexuality between the architect and Liesel in her widening eyes and slightly parted lips. His response was not straightforward jealousy; he considered the possibilities of faithfulness and betrayal. The proposed wall therefore entered the house already carrying more than a design function: it was at once an expensive object, a display of the architect’s sensibility, and a point where the private relations surrounding the commission became visible.

The cost made that tension concrete. Asked to name the price, von Abt estimated approximately fifteen thousand dollars. Viktor calculated that this amounted to about half a million crowns—enough, he protested, to build a whole house. Von Abt continued to argue for the wall’s exceptional effect, and Viktor acknowledged that it would be remarkable, while observing that people might own onyx ashtrays but he could not imagine anyone else with an onyx wall. Its singularity was inseparable from its excess.

From Construction to Living House

The partition took shape as the house itself grew from a construction site into a home. The building’s progress was slower than the baby’s rapid development: steel beams were laid, concrete poured, and space enclosed, while delays, shortages of materials, and problems with the workforce prolonged the work through summer and autumn. When the shell was completed in winter, it did not yet feel like a finished home. The family entered a bare, echoing structure of white plaster, rough floors, hanging bulbs, and canvas in place of the Glass Room’s eventual glazing.

Viktor later told Liesel that she could have her onyx wall. When she asked what had changed his mind, he answered, “Fingernails,” and named Venus’s fingernails. The brief explanation joins the practical decision to the intimate life unfolding around it without spelling out every implication. What had seemed to Viktor an extravagance became something he chose to permit, and the wall’s path into the house remained bound to desire and persuasion as well as architectural intention.

During the autumn, workers carried fittings and furnishings into the building. In the Glass Room they mounted the onyx slabs, whose amber and honey veins resembled the contours of a distant prehistoric landscape. Polished to a mirror-like gloss, the stone caught, blocked, and reflected the light. At sunset, when the sun over the Špilas fortress shone directly onto it, the wall glowed fiery red. Hana Hanáková, seeing that effect, remarked on the passion that could lie inside inert rock. The wall did not merely divide two parts of the room: through its changing surface, it altered how the room’s light and atmosphere were experienced.

Its setting sharpened the contrast between surfaces and spatial feeling. The bathrooms were tiled in white up to the ceiling, taking on the plain sterility of a laboratory or clinic. The ivory-coloured linoleum in the Glass Room, by contrast, seemed translucent in daylight and held the reflections of the frosted ceiling lights at night. The upper floor was divided into rooms and boxes; below, the open space joined the room’s surfaces into a single, expansive interior. The onyx partition occupied a central place in this designed play of light, material, and openness.

A Changed Room, a Changed Meaning

The wall’s meaning shifted when the Landauer House was transformed into a Nazi biometric research centre. The upstairs rooms became offices, the kitchens were being converted into a laboratory, and the basement was prepared for an X-ray machine; a former room became a photographic darkroom. Curtains divided the Glass Room, and anthropometric instruments were arranged in front of the onyx: weighing scales, a height-measuring stand, and a chair fitted with steel rulers above its headrest. Nearby, tables held callipers. The dining area became a photographic studio, with drapes over its curved Macassar panelling, lights directed toward the curve, and a Rolleiflex camera waiting on a tripod.

In this new arrangement, the wall persisted while the room’s purpose was forcibly altered. The stone’s veined surface, once selected for its colour and dramatic response to daylight, now stood behind devices used to measure and classify human bodies. The piano was the incongruous remnant of the house’s former life; the partition, too, belonged to the material past, but was made to serve within an apparatus of racial science. Its survival through this conversion makes the object more than a symbol of domestic luxury: it becomes a fixed element against which the house’s change of ownership and function can be read.

The later public description of the building emphasizes the scale of the Glass Room and its architectural distinction. A report on the Landauer House identifies it as the masterpiece of Rainer von Abt, his last European work before he fled to the United States in 1938. It describes a living room of 230 square metres, two entire walls of glass, and a view across the city toward the Špilas. Although the report does not isolate the onyx partition from the room as a whole, its account of the house’s light, openness, and celebrated modern design gives the wall a place within a larger architectural conception.

Restoration and the Wall’s Afterlife

By 1990, the house had become an architectural landmark caught between preservation and continued use. Repairs were poorly done, and some original furniture was recovered from the Moravian Museum and returned approximately to its former place. The bathroom fittings were updated but ruined; the Glass Room’s window panes, however, were removed and plate glass restored, bringing the space back to its full lucid splendour. Visitors included groups from fraternal Soviet states and, later, tourists and architecture students interested in von Abt’s place in modernism.

The onyx wall’s history thus belongs to the house’s repeated conversion of space. It began as a disputed luxury in a family’s unfinished home, became a striking surface within an inhabited Glass Room, and remained in place when that room was partitioned and equipped for racial measurement. In the restored building, the glass and stone again participate in an architectural experience of light and openness, though the accumulated history cannot be erased by repair. The wall’s material continuity makes visible the difference between a design’s intended use and the uses imposed upon it: the same exceptional feature that once announced the architect’s ambition endured the violent transformation of the house and its later return to public view.