Mies Van der Rohe in the Tugendhat House #Mies Van der Rohe

The furniture that Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich created together reached its summit in the Tugendhat House in Brno. Thanks to the cooperation of the Tugendhat family, Mies designed for this house more new furniture than in any other commission of his career.

The dwelling repeated the steel structure of the Barcelona Pavilion with a similar aim: on one hand, the space is absolutely free to be defined; on the other hand, this freedom is implemented in an ordered, regular way. However, unlike the Barcelona Pavilion, the Tugendhat House was designed for a domestic use. So, furniture, carpets and curtains organised the different areas of the house.

The Tugendhat chair and the Brno chair were specially created for this house. The Brno chair was designed for the dining room and was an evolution of the Weissenhof chair with a less pronounced curvature. As for the Tugendhat chair, it was supposed to match the comfort of the traditional upholstered armchairs by means of a cantilever steel frame. The Tugendhat chairs were used together with two Barcelona chairs in the main living room, in front of the onyx wall.

The open daytime area and the fact that the architect designed also the furniture and interior decoration were criticised by the contemporary press, blaming the architect for constraining the intimacy and freedom of the inhabitants of the house. But the inhabitants themselves defended Mies’s work.

The incomparable veining of the marble and the natural grain of the wood don’t take the place of art, they rather take part in the art, in the space, which is where art is here.
Fritz and Grete Tugendhat, 1931