Prague enters the story as a place people travel to for what their own city cannot offer, and as a point of contact with art and architectural history. Its most consequential connection is to the Landauer House, whose fate shows how a modernist domestic ideal can be successively appropriated, repurposed, and remembered.

A City of Cultural Contrast

During a visit to Vienna, Miroslav Němec’s wife describes Prague as a city with nothing to compare to Vienna’s abundance of shops and cafés. Her complaint explains why she is compelled to travel to the Austrian capital, even at the cost of paying duty at the border. The contrast gives Prague a practical place in the novel’s geography: it is not simply a rival city, but the point of departure from which another city’s abundance is measured.

Prague also becomes a destination for Liesel Landauer and Viktor Landauer when they travel there to purchase a sculpture from an art dealer. Liesel is surprised that Rainer von Abt agrees to the purchase. The sculpture, which Hana Hanáková had urged them to add as a touch of the feminine, is installed beside the onyx wall in the sitting room. It looks over Liesel’s shoulder toward whoever occupies the chairs. Her judgment that it is beautiful encompasses not only the sculpture but the room and the house as a whole: in that moment, the journey to Prague brings an artistic object into the home’s carefully composed vision of perfection.

From Private House to Instrument of Occupation

The Landauer House’s original growth is set against the rapid development of Liesel and Viktor’s baby. The child’s changes arrive in milestones—a grasp, focused eyes, a first smile, recognition of her parents, and a first laugh—while the building advances through steel beams, concrete, and the enclosing of space. Delays in materials and labour prolong its construction through summer and autumn. When the shell is finally complete in winter, the family finds no celebratory ceremony awaiting them: from outside, the house looks more like a warehouse than a home, and its bare rooms smell of new cement and plaster.

Under Nazi occupation, the house’s carefully designed spaces are given a radically different use. Its upstairs rooms become offices; the kitchens are converted into a laboratory; a basement room is prepared for an X-ray machine. The Glass Room is divided by curtains, and the onyx wall stands before scales, a height-measuring stand, and a steel chair fitted with rulers for measuring the head. A photographic studio occupies the dining area, while a darkroom already left by the original owners is put to use. The Bösendorfer piano remains, its tones restored by a Jewish piano tuner, an incongruous remnant of the former household amid the apparatus of racial measurement.

The conversion reaches beyond the rooms themselves. Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH equipment is unloaded into the garage that once housed the Landauer motor cars; soldiers carry boxes of accumulated files into the building. A residence organized around light, space, and family life becomes a working site for bureaucratic documentation. Its transparency and measured geometry, once part of a modernist domestic ideal, are made to serve an institution that classifies people.

The Glass Room in Later Life

In a later period, the building serves as a children’s gymnasium, and Tomáš habitually calls it the Glass Room. The word he uses for room can also mean peace, quiet, or tranquillity, making the name carry a second sense: Glass Tranquillity. For him, the space seems detached from period and style, a place of light and stillness where he can be with Zdenka after work. He watches her dance classes there, an irregular source of extra income that continues because some of the dancers are children of party officials and the authorities turn a blind eye.

That private use is not free of constraint. A housing shortage leaves Tomáš living in his parents’ home and Zdenka in a nurses’ hostel where men are not allowed in the women’s section. With nowhere safe to go, the two make love on the Glass Room floor despite the possibility of being discovered. The same former living room that once framed a family’s privileged domestic life is now a state-owned gymnasium in which people improvise intimacy around institutional rules. The room’s associations with peace and quiet coexist with its exposure and public use.

The building’s gymnasium role becomes the subject of a newspaper correspondent’s architectural argument. The article identifies it as a villa built for the prominent Landauer family by Rainer von Abt, his last European work before he fled to the United States in 1938, and describes it as his masterpiece. It stresses the living room’s scale—230 square metres—and its two glass walls, which open a view across the city toward Špilas. While the correspondent acknowledges the value of providing sick children with a good environment, the article questions whether their treatment needs to take place inside an architectural treasure. The dispute makes the house’s competing claims visible: preservation, public use, and care for children meet in the same space.

Restoration and the Return of Memory

By 1990, the house exists like a fossil, fixed in time and space. Repairs are carried out badly; some original furniture is retrieved from the Moravian Museum and returned approximately to its former place, while updated bathroom fittings are ruined. The restoration of the Glass Room’s plate-glass panes, however, restores its lucid splendour. Visitors arrive first in small groups from fraternal Soviet states and later as occasional tourists or architecture students, drawn in part by questions about Rainer von Abt’s place in modernism.

Shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Marie Delmas travels from Paris to Prague and onward to Město. Her reason for making the journey is a coincidence: in a public library on the rue Sorbier, she opened a book on modern architecture and saw a photograph that belonged to her memory. The restored house is thus more than a landmark for architectural visitors. It becomes the image that draws a long-absent witness back toward a past lodged in the building, linking Prague’s architectural history to the private persistence of memory.