In 2020, we commemorated 90 years since the completion of Villa Tugendhat, designed by the world-famous architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Since the Villa had to be closed due to goverment regulations concerning the global pandemic situation most of the year, spectacular plans for accompanying programs celebrating the jubilee unfortunately could not be realized. We would like to offer visitors who could not visit the Villa in person the exhibitions held in 2020 at least in this online form.
The exhibition plan, professional lectures or guided tours and other events prepared by the Villa Tugendhat Study and Documentation Centre were thus consistently focused only on topics related to the Tugendhat family home and its architect in 2020. The curatorial team in cooperation with a number of domestic and foreign experts was going to present new knowledge about the villa itself or consider the position of the villa in the scope of Mies’ whole work, as perceived by his contemporaries (Philip Johnson) and as reflected today. Furthermore, the public should learn about the post-war destiny of the house and the evaluation of the restoration of the building as an installed monument of modern architecture.
EXHIBITIONS:
PIECES OF MIES: REUNION.
LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE: VILA TUGENDHAT AND THE BARCELONA PAVILION
30. 12. 2019 – 8. 3. 2020
UNESCO sights are a kind of fetish. So are instant photos. David Židlický, a long-time photographer of Villa Tugendhat, combines these two aspects in his unique large-format instant photographs from Brno and Barcelona taken in 2019. However, the created works are not “fetish squared”, but an effort to grasp the notoriously known spaces through a technical process that captures the atmosphere of the place as perfectly as possible at a particular moment, i.e. the legendary photographic here and now. More information about the project: atelierzidlicky.eu.
Curator: Lukáš Bártl
Details of exhibition: https://www.tugendhat.eu/en/pieces-of-mies--reunion.html
ARINA DÄHNICK: THE MIES PROJECT
11. 3. – 3. 5. 2020
A project by Berlin photographer Arina Dähnick presents contemporary architectural portraits of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's buildings in America and Europe. A travelling exhibition presented in several of Mies' iconic works, the Barcelona Pavilion, Farnsworth House in Illinois, the Crown Hall, Rangefinder Gallery in Chicago, in New York, will also be presented at Villa Tugendhat in Brno.
Curators: Jana Vránová, Lucie Valdhansová
Details of exhibition: https://www.tugendhat.eu/en/arina-dahnick--the-mies-project.html
The exhibition was installed on the technical floor of Villa Tugendhat. Its presentation was interrupted due to the closure of the villa because of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The Mies Project will be on display again at Villa Tugendhat in the spring of 2021.
LENSLESS
30. 6. 2020 – 30. 8. 2020
At a time of breathtaking quality of today's digital cameras, we can perceive an increasingly strong tendency among photographers to return to the essence of the medium and work with technologies that do not stun with their image qualities, rather on the contrary with rawness and imperfection. Such photographers include Pavel Piňos, who has been fascinated by photographs made with a pinhole camera. He has been working with the camera obscura for years, assembling cameras and working with unusual materials. Above all, however, he regularly participates in photographic workshops in the Tugendhat Villa focused on this technique, and the specific environment of the villa has somehow become one of his main themes, perhaps even obsessions over time. He photographs this luxurious architecture with a certain type of voyeurism, capturing not only places that he normally "presents" to visitors during tours, but also by placing his cameras like mousetraps in the rooms. Then he anxiously waits for the result, which is always a bit uncertain… The Lensless exhibition will present a selection of his hitherto unpublished and unpresented works.
Curator: Lukáš Bártl
Details of exhibition: https://www.tugendhat.eu/en/lensless.html
RE.FLECTION.TUGENDHAT.90
autumn – winter 2020
The autumn cycle of short-term exhibitions is dedicated to the anniversary of the completion of the villa in 1930. It will anachronically present selected chapters from the history of Villa Tugendhat and it is prepared by the team of the Villa Tugendhat Study and Documentation Centre with other experts. It is linked to the Mies in Brno / Villa Tugendhat exhibition in the Brno House of Arts.
RE.STORATION.2010.2012
22/9 – 1/11/2020
The RE.STORATION.2010.2012 exhibition presents the course, idea and selected restoration procedures of the comprehensive monument restoration of Villa Tugendhat and its adaptation to an installed monument of modern architecture – a historical building with recreated interiors. Emphasis was placed on the preservation of the original materials and technical equipment, so that the greatest possible degree of authenticity of the monument is preserved.
The exhibition is conceived as an interactive archive on the technical floor of the villa. It includes, among other things, exclusively exhibited original elements from 1930, found during the restoration of the monument. The timeline informs about their finding, supplemented by a printed construction site journal with a detailed workflow, month after month. With the help of image and text panels, visitors can study individual areas, technologies and procedures of monument restoration. The exhibition is also complemented by 10 short videos mapping the course of the comprehensive restoration of the monument.
Details of exhibition: https://www.tugendhat.eu/en/restoration20102012.html
RE.CAPITULATION.1945.1996
3/11 – 13/12/2020 / postponed to 21/11/2020 – 14/2/2021 due to COVID
The exhibition presents the many years of research work of the Villa Tugendhat Study and Documentation Centre, which has been examining individual fragments and personal testimonies documenting the fate of the original family home, the use of which radically changed in the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II, the villa gradually became the venue of a dance school, a rehabilitation centre, a representative building of the city (with hotel-type accommodation), and after the political changes it opened to the public as a museum. The mostly pictorial installation of period photographs will be supplemented in the exhibition by the original artefacts of the villa's equipment in the 1980’s, commonly stored in the depository of the Brno City Museum.
Details of exhibition: https://www.tugendhat.eu/en/recapitulation19451996.html
RE.PRESENTATION.1931.1969
15/12/2020 – 28/02/2021 / postponed to 16/2/ – 14/3/2021 due to COVID
The last exhibition in the RE.FLECTION.TUGENDHAT.90 series is dedicated to the completion of the building, which has become an icon of modern architecture, and its acceptance by domestic and international experts. At first, the Czech professional public deliberately ignored it and later even criticized it. The house was first published abroad in the German Die Form magazine, including testimonies of the clients themselves. Mutual understanding between the client and the architect was one of the key factors influencing the final form of the building.
The exhibition will also present a professional media reflection of Villa Tugendhat after its completion and later in the 1960’s, when theorists rediscovered interwar modernity. Curators Henry-Russel Hitchcock and Philip Johnson in particular contributed to the villa's international reputation in the 1930’s, when it was included in a travelling exhibition on Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1932, in addition to other world-renowned buildings of modern architecture, where the villa was documented by photographs of Rudolf Sandalo.
Supporting programme RE.FLECTION.TUGENDHAT.90:
ARCHITECTURE DAY 2020 IN VILLA TUGENDHAT
Brno – RE.STORATION.2010.2012
1. – 7. 10. 2020
Special guided tours of the villa with its restorers and authors of the restoration in the years 2010-2012. The restorers presented the procedure and technology of restoring the furniture and technical equipment of the villa, the architects presented the plan for the restoration of the monument. The tours also included the RE.STORATION.2010.2012 exhibition.
Video for the jubilee of the Villa:
On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the family Tugendhat's house, today's UNESCO monument, completion, a video capturing its breathtaking changing atmosphere was shot and published on the anniversary of the approval which took place on 1st December 1930.
You can watch the video here: https://www.tugendhat.eu/en/video-tugendhat-90.html
