Landauer Villa

The Landauer Villa is at once a modernist family home and a space repeatedly claimed by forces beyond its owners’ control. Its most distinctive room, the Glass Room, gathers light and offers a view across the city; it also becomes an image of rational order whose apparent serenity cannot protect the people who inhabit it. As the house passes from private residence to instrument of racial bureaucracy, public health facility, and architectural monument, its successive lives turn architecture into a record of political power, exile, and memory.

Design and domestic beginnings

In the Blackfield district, overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre, the Landauer Villa was commissioned by a prominent capitalist family and designed by Rainer von Abt in the late 1920s. The house was considered von Abt’s masterpiece and his last European work before he fled to the United States in 1938. Its living room, a space of 230 square metres, opened through two glass walls toward a view across the city to Špilas. Chrome pillars supported the structure, and south-facing windows brought light into the room. Furniture had been specially designed for the house, though much of it later disappeared; some pieces were held at the Moravian Museum.

Construction and family life developed side by side, but on different clocks. While the house’s steel beams were laid and concrete poured, the baby’s growth was marked by first grasping, focusing her eyes, smiling, recognizing her parents, pushing herself up, and laughing. The building’s progress was slower and more vulnerable to delay: problems with materials and the workforce brought arguments and frustration through summer and autumn. When the shell was finally complete in winter, there was no ceremony to mark it. The family found a bare, warehouse-like structure on the hillside, with rough concrete floors, white plaster walls, and single hundred-watt bulbs. The home’s celebrated light and space had not yet become a lived-in world.

The Glass Room and the threat of departure

As the international situation worsens, the house’s poise sharpens the contrast between its promise of stability and the family’s precarious position. Viktor tries to explain to Liesel that leaving could mean not merely leaving the house or the city but emigrating from the country, at least until the danger passes. At first, she does not understand the scale of what he is proposing. Around them, the Glass Room still signifies quiet, balance, and rationality; for Viktor, those qualities are no answer to the threat gathering beyond its windows.

At a Christmas gathering, Viktor stands by a Maillol torso, looking at the decorated tree, three children, and three women. Beyond the glass, snow falls over the whole city and across contested lands, over soldiers establishing new positions and people who are triumphant or dispossessed. Seen from within the Glass Room, the flakes appear stationary, and the villa seems to rise softly into the air. The vision makes the room seem briefly detached from the political ground below it, while the question of invasion remains unresolved.

Departure makes that separation impossible to sustain. The nearly emptied Glass Room returns, in appearance, to the moment before the furniture arrived: piano, a few chairs, chrome pillars, the onyx wall, and the curved Macassar wood partition remain. The room’s calm, measured spaces now frame the family’s impending loss. Liesel asks whether leaving breaks Viktor’s heart; he answers that the house is still theirs, has not been sold or given away, and will be watched over by her parents, Laník, and his sister. His practical reassurance does not cancel the pain of departure. Liesel pauses for one last look as rain blurs the windows, an image that links the distorted view outside with memories altered by time and mood.

The convoy leaves down Blackfield Road on Friday the seventeenth, with Viktor and Liesel and the children in the first car, Katalin and Marika with the luggage in the second, and Oskar and Hana following. New traffic regulations have brought a new highway code and a new way of driving. The unusually empty streets make the city feel suspended, but the family is already moving through a changed world. After takeoff, Liesel recognizes the hospital, the slope of grass and trees, and at last the villa on the hill: the long, low form of von Abt’s design and the blank wall of glass. Seeing her house from above, she weeps at the possibility that she may never see it again and at a future made uncertain by fear.

Seizure and conversion

After the owners’ flight, the villa’s carefully composed rooms are reorganized for Nazi racial research. Upstairs rooms become offices, the kitchens are converted into a laboratory, and a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. Another room already contains a photographic darkroom left by the previous owners. Curtains divide the Glass Room; scales, a height-measuring stand, callipers, and a steel-and-ruler apparatus for measuring a seated subject are arranged before the onyx wall. The dining area, framed by its semicircle of Macassar panelling, becomes a photographic studio with a Rolleiflex camera on a tripod. The former domestic interior is not simply occupied: it is refitted to make bodies measurable and records producible.

The piano remains as a dissonant remnant of the earlier life. A Jewish tuner restores the Bösendorfer’s tones at the new authority’s direction, even as documentary machinery arrives to serve the research operation. The garage, once large enough for two Landauer motor cars, receives black steel-and-Bakelite machines manufactured by Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH. Soldiers carry boxes of files into the building. The villa’s spaces now connect measurement and photography to the processing of collected documentation, while the piano preserves a sound from the household whose owners have been driven away.

Public uses and contested heritage

In a later period, the Landauer Villa serves as a children’s gymnasium. Tomáš calls the physiotherapy space the Glass Room, and the word he uses for room can also mean peace, quiet, or tranquillity. For him, the name carries both the building’s architecture and the calm he finds there after work with children crippled by disease. He sometimes watches Zdenka’s dance classes in the room. They provide her with extra income, and the use of a state-owned building for private classes is tolerated in part because some dancers are children of party officials. The Glass Room thus becomes a workplace and a place of refuge within an institutionally assigned use.

That conversion also becomes a matter of public argument. A newspaper correspondent identifies the building as an architectural treasure in the Blackfield district and questions whether such a landmark should be used as a children’s gymnasium. The article acknowledges the value of treatment in a good environment but disputes whether that care needs to take place inside an architectural masterpiece. Its account emphasizes the villa’s design and history even as the building continues to serve children’s needs. The disagreement sets preservation against living use without making either claim disappear: the architecture matters, but so does the work taking place within it.

Preservation and the house as memory

By 1990, the villa is treated as a structure fixed in time, though its restoration remains imperfect. Repairs are done badly, some furniture from the Moravian Museum is returned to approximate positions, and updated bathroom fittings are ruined. The Glass Room receives more exacting attention: its window panes are removed and plate glass restored, returning the room to what the account calls its full lucid splendour. Visitors arrive first in small groups from fraternal Soviet states, then as occasional tourists and architecture students concerned with von Abt’s place in modernism.

The restored room can recover its light and formal clarity, but preservation cannot restore the original household or undo the building’s intervening histories. The villa has been a home, an instrument of racial administration, a treatment space, and an exhibit of architectural heritage. Each new use leaves the basic design legible while changing what its spaces mean and who may occupy them. The house’s most powerful continuity is therefore not an unbroken domestic life, but its capacity to hold incompatible memories: the promise of rational, open space alongside exile, coercion, care, and the effort to make the past visible.