The conservationists have approved the restoration of the Tugendhat villa; a building permit will be issued

Brno - The Brno councilors will soon be able to announce a tender for the company that will restore the functionalist Tugendhat villa. Heritage conservationists from the regional office issued the last decision today that is necessary for the issuance of a building permit. They had previously agreed to the restoration project but were not satisfied with the proposal for securing the building's structure. The designers have revised the proposal. The new design meets the heritage requirements, said Tomáš Drobný, head of the heritage care department at the region, to ČTK today.
The structural engineer originally proposed to strengthen all the foundation bases on which the villa's pillars stand. "In this project, only two bases are being secured that were insufficiently founded at the time of construction; additionally, there have been changes in the substrate layers due to an accident or damage to the sewage system," Drobný said. The villa's structure will also be improved by connecting stairs to the foundations using concrete strips. The stairs were founded later than the building's structure and were not connected to the foundations.
Deputy Mayor Ladislav Macek said today to ČTK that the decision of the heritage conservationists will allow officials to issue the building permit. The municipal workers will then prepare the conditions for announcing the tender for the construction company, and the councilors will declare the competition. "If we can complete the tender within two or three months and there are no dissatisfied bidders causing administrative obstacles, reconstruction will begin in the first part of the second half of the year," Macek stated. The restoration of the heritage site will cost more than 100 million crowns. This year, approximately 20 million crowns is allocated for the construction in the city's budget.
The villa is the only Czech modern art building listed on the UNESCO heritage list since 2001. Its heritage restoration was supposed to begin a year later. However, its start has repeatedly been postponed due to disputes among the teams that participated in the tender for the designer. The architects continue to argue to this day; one of the court hearings took place just under two weeks ago.
The descendants of the original owners requested the return of the villa from Brno last year due to the delays in the reconstruction, which the councilors rejected.
The structure of the villa, which delayed the preparation of the project and the necessary permits, is important for the heritage conservationists. The load-bearing elements of the house are unique. The building consists of a steel skeleton, and the floors are not supported by walls, but only by slender pillars. This type of construction allowed architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 to 1969) to clad the house in glass panels, some of which could even be slid into the ground. Mies, who is considered the father of modern 20th-century architecture, thus breathed life into his idea of a habitable continuous space; the glass walls literally brought the surroundings into the house.