If you haven’t been to architect Mies Van Der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno, this exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive on Merrion Square will give you all the impetus you need to get there. While we can assess, gain understanding, and measure remotely, most architects and historians will argue that the truest understanding of a built artefact arises from a visit. We cannot fully get a sense of acoustics, natural lighting, ventilation, or innocuous details without experiencing a space first-hand. This exhibition does not aim to recreate the experience of visiting Villa Tugendhat, but does something else, managing to present a forensic telling of the background, history, construction, and restoration of the house: a dissection that can be objectively presented at some distance from the artefact itself.

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This exhibition is not just about a building; it is about the concepts, lives lived, and legacies connected to that building. For almost a century, the Villa Tugendhat has captured a collective architectural imagination. Take, for example, the catalogue of the seminal 1932 Modern Architecture: International Exhibition in New York. Its cover features a black-and-white photograph of the Tugendhat House, at that time a mere two years old. With hundreds of celebrated works to choose from, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock were making a statement by foregrounding Mies’ structure, which they saw as the direction of modernity.

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While the building’s white walls, chrome-finished steel structure, extensive glass, lavish stone, and technical devices were all striking for 1930, they alone have not gifted its enduring presence. More important still is its demonstration of the new concept of theatrical living in open-plan, adaptable spaces: not just the house, but the idea of the house. With its seemingly experimental, avant-garde ambitions, this exhibition reminds us of art historian Justus Bier’s provocation: ‘Can the Villa Tugendhat be lived in?’

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I found it enjoyable to ponder this question within a restored late eighteenth-century home in Dublin. We read of Tugendhat’s interiors flooded with daylight from its glazed facades just as the low winter’s sun penetrates the portrait sash windows of no. 45 Merrion Square. We are invited to imagine the flowing living spaces of Mies’ open-plan design as we pass from lofty room to room in the piano nobile of the former Georgian home. One couldn’t imagine such different ideas on dwelling.

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The content can be explored at a number of depths: the time-pressed observer can cast their eyes over the beautiful drawings and photographs, the custom furniture on loan; someone invested in history can spend time understanding the Tugendhat family and the remarkable episodes this building lived through; and a practitioner or academic interested in the restoration of modern structures can read an in-depth overview of the scientific and faithful remaking of the house.  

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German designer Lily Reich has been largely sidelined in the popular history of Mies’ European career – a contribution that is gradually being reclaimed – and while she does gain credit in this overview, it is still not abundantly clear where in the interiors and furniture she has full or even equal authorship to Mies. However, one antidote to the often-overzealous cult of Mies is the well-balanced attention given to the building’s clients: Fritz and Grete Tugendhat. They were not bystanders to his genius, but engaged and fluent, creative and conscious in their direction. Their life stories are tragic, including a desperate flight from persecution to Venezuela, and while Grete returned to visit in the 1960s, Fritz never saw their home again.

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The intriguing black-and-white photographs of the Villa’s wartime and post-war occupation provide a complex and rounded portrait of this structure, particularly its afterlife as a dance school and, later, a children’s physiotherapy centre. An Irish audience might draw comparisons with the familiar turbulent history of Eileen Grey’s E1027, built concurrently to Tugendhat in 1928. Photographer Miloš Budík’s photograph of a group of young women in the physiotherapy centre, taken in 1956, is particularly captivating: an accidental, temporary use distils some of the most promising aspects of modern architecture: light, airiness, reflection, ventilation, to create a humanistic space for living.  

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The Villa Tugendhat exhibition – presented by the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the Villa Tugendhat – is free to enter and runs at the Irish Architectural Archive from 22 January to 10 April 2026.

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