This depicts the closing of the retractable window opposite the onyx wall. It was the only original one to be preserved up until the 1980s, see the archive photo documentation from the post-war period.

The destruction of the only preserved glazing of the retractable window ranks among the most discussed moments in the renewal and reconstruction of the Villa in the 1980s. It was preserved due to it having been retracted to the floor at the time of the bombardment at the end of World War Two, thus being protected from the pressure wave in the engine room behind the plaster of the enclosure walls. The project contained a requirement for the provision of glazing for this plate along with retouching of the frame construction and consequent placement of the original plate back. “When we came that time on the supervision day, I still remember it as if it were today, the plate was no longer there, there were not even any broken shards of glass”. These are the words of Ing. Josef Janeček describing the situation at the time. This irreplaceable loss, often blamed on the designers, was only definitively solved quite recently. According to an account of one of the employees of the Construction Company of the City of Brno, who worked at Villa Tugendhat in the 1980s, the window was destroyed during the final phase of construction at the order of the investor. The reason behind this being the fact that the ‘old’ window did not ‘fit’ with the new glazing in terms of its colour scheme and the absence of a dividing seam and therefore the new glazing of the garden façade had to be ‘made uniform’.