In the Löw-Beer Villa in Brno, a new exhibition has opened

The exhibition "The World of Brno's Bourgeoisie between Löw-Beer and Tugendhat" was opened today at Brno's Löw-Beer Villa. It will be open to the public from Saturday and offers a glimpse into the history of architecture and the lifestyle of the Brno bourgeoisie in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, said Petra Svobodová at a press conference, who is responsible for the management of the villa as a branch of the Museum of Brno.

"The exhibition highlights the economic and construction activities of the Löw-Beers, which significantly exceeded the borders of Brno and the republic," said Svobodová. The Löw-Beers were a Jewish family that built textile factories in Brno and significantly contributed to the industrial growth of the city. Alfred Löw-Beer's daughter was Greta, who married Tugendhat, and in 1929, her father gave her part of his land. A functionalist villa Tugendhat was subsequently built on it. Due to its uniqueness, it was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Most family members fled the Nazis to Great Britain in 1939, while Alfred stayed in former Czechoslovakia for a while and died while fleeing.

In the exhibition, visitors will learn about the genealogy of the family, the gradual growth of the villa district in Černé Pole, and find an installation of a bourgeois dining room from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. "The atmosphere of a textile factory around 1900 will be created by an installation of a beating machine with smaller exhibits related to wool processing. These are from the Technical Museum in Brno," Svobodová noted.

The exhibition on the history of architecture was created with the help of students from this field at VUT. "We have over ten models here that document the development from late historicism through Art Nouveau to functionalism," added Svobodová.

The costs of the exhibition amounted to 4.4 million crowns. A European grant of 2.3 million was successfully obtained for it, and the rest was paid by the South Moravian Region, which is the founder of the Museum of Brno.

The Löw-Beer Villa is one of the quartet of famous and already restored and accessible Brno villas from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The others are the Tugendhat Villa, the Stiassni Villa, and the Jurkovič Villa. Each of them is owned by a different institution, but they strive to cooperate and promote themselves together.