Professional architectural excursions are an indispensable part of educating future architects. Experiencing exceptional buildings and their surrounding context on-site provides students with unique, direct knowledge and understanding that would be difficult to gain otherwise. With first-year students, we visit the jewel of Brno functionalist style — Villa Tugendhat. This monument, listed on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List, is the most significant European work of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

It was built in 1929–1930 for the Tugendhat family in Brno’s Černá Pole district. The project was entrusted to one of the most important European architects of the time, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The architect designed the villa on three levels, although from the street it appears as a single-story building. The upper entrance floor includes an entrance hall, separate bedrooms for the parents, two children’s rooms, a nanny’s room, and a spacious terrace with a view of the city. Adjacent to the upper floor are the caretaker’s apartment and a garage for two cars.

The middle floor served as the main living and representative part of the villa. It features a large open living space subtly divided by textile curtains, a wooden semicircular wall, and an onyx wall that separates the workspace from the living room. This floor also includes a winter garden separated by a glass wall. The entire southwest side of the living area is glazed with seven large glass panels, two of which can be slid under the floor, thereby opening the living space to the garden. The exterior thus becomes part of the interior.

The basement housed the laundry, drying room, storage rooms, and boiler room. The garden was also part of Mies’s architectural design and provided access to the lower-lying Löw-Beer villa.

This year’s excursion to Villa Tugendhat took place over two January dates, accompanied by staff from the Institute of Architecture, Lukáš Ležatka and Markéta Klanicová. More than 50 students, mostly from the first year, participated.