Masaryk quarter first appears as the setting of a rented, turreted villa that embodies everything Viktor and Liesel Landauer do not want in a home. Overlooking the Svratka River and wooded hills, it is filled with ormolu lamps, velvet drapes, ornate plaster ceilings, and Murano-glass chandeliers. Against these heavy interiors, the couple and Rainer von Abt imagine a modern house shaped by light, glass, and open living. The quarter thus frames a larger transformation: a domestic ideal takes form there, but the house it produces is repeatedly remade by political power and changing public use.

The rented villa and the modern-house ideal

When the Landauers return home, they move into the furnished villa in Masaryk quarter while their own house is still only an idea. Viktor’s exasperation at its surroundings sets the terms of that idea: they seek a home adapted to the future rather than the past, and to open modern life rather than the secrecy and stagnation they associate with the previous century. The contrast is not merely stylistic. The villa’s weighty walls and elaborate furnishings make visible the domestic order they hope to leave behind.

The quarter is also where Liesel brings Rainer von Abt to see their infant daughter, Ottilie. The nurse carries the baby into the sitting room, whose heavy drapes, coffin-like furniture, and flock wallpaper sharpen the contrast between the rented house and the future home they discuss. Von Abt describes that future as a new way of life, and the visit joins family life to architectural planning: the envisioned space is meant to make room for the family they are creating.

Building, delay, and transformation

The house and the child grow in parallel, though at different speeds. Ottilie’s development is marked by gestures and milestones, while construction proceeds through steel beams, poured concrete, and the enclosure of space. Delays caused by problems with materials and the workforce stretch across summer and autumn, bringing argument and frustration before work is resolved. When the shell is completed in winter, there is no celebratory ceremony. Seen from the hillside, the unfinished building resembles a warehouse; inside, bare concrete, dusty floors, plain white walls, and single hundred-watt bulbs make the future home feel provisional rather than triumphant.

That modern domestic space later becomes a site of administrative and racial control. Under Nazi occupation, the upstairs rooms are converted to offices and the kitchens to a laboratory. A basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine, while the Glass Room is divided by curtains and furnished with scales, height-measuring equipment, callipers, and a photographic setup. The onyx wall becomes a backdrop for anthropometric work. What had been conceived as an open family interior is partitioned and equipped to inspect and classify bodies.

A building under successive uses

In a later period, the Landauer House serves as a children’s gymnasium. Tomáš calls the space the Glass Room, and the narrative draws attention to the double sense of the word pokoj: room, but also peace, quiet, or tranquillity. For him, the room offers light and stillness after work with children disabled by disease. He watches Zdenka’s dance classes there, a private enterprise tolerated in a state-owned building partly because some pupils are children of party officials. The room’s use is therefore both public and intimate: a place for children’s exercise, and a refuge in which Tomáš and Zdenka can spend time together.

The building’s changing functions become a public controversy when a correspondent questions whether an architectural treasure should house a children’s gymnasium. The article identifies the Landauer House as a villa in the Blackfield district, overlooking Lužánky Park and the city centre, and reports that the Landauers commissioned Rainer von Abt in the late 1920s. It calls the house his European masterpiece before his flight to the United States in 1938. Its living room, measuring 230 square metres and having two glass walls with a view toward Špilas, is presented as the feature that makes the building exceptional. The debate sets heritage against living use, even as the gymnasium gives the house a practical role in the care of sick children.

Restoration and remembered place

By 1990, the house is described as fixed in time and space, like a fossil. Repairs are poorly done; some original furniture is retrieved from the Moravian Museum and returned approximately to its former positions, while updated bathroom fittings are ruined. The decisive restoration is in the Glass Room: its windowpanes are removed and plate glass reinstated, returning the space to its lucid splendour. Visitors come first from fraternal Soviet states and later from abroad, including architecture students interested in von Abt’s place in modernism.

Shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Marie Delmas arrives from Paris, drawn by a coincidence: in a library book on modern architecture she has found a photograph of a place she remembers. The house has become more than a landmark or preserved object; it is a structure capable of carrying private memory across distance and political change. Masaryk quarter’s central significance lies in this succession of meanings: a rented villa prompts a vision of openness, the completed home is appropriated for coercive measurement, and its later life as gymnasium and restored monument never wholly erases the lives and histories held within its rooms.