At this year's World Architecture Festival, Brno will present the Tesař Villa

Brno – Brno will participate this year in the worldwide online architecture festival Open House Worldwide with the Tesař Villa, which has stood in the Masaryk Quarter since 1937. The building will appear in a one-hour block alongside the Baldizzi Apartment from New York. Architectural historian Šárka Svobodová will present live from the Tesař Villa. The festival will take place on April 9 and will showcase 50 buildings from around the world.

"In our joint presentation with New York, we will map the stories of specific families on both sides of the Atlantic and the impact of the Great Depression. In Brno, we will focus on the story of the director of the Živnostenská Bank, Augustin Tesař, whose descendants still live in the villa bearing Tesař's name,” stated Lucie Pešl Šilerová, the creative director of the Brno segment of the festival, in a press release.

The Tesař Villa was designed by Bohuslav Fuchs in the functionalist style. In 2011, the villa underwent renovation.

Interested parties can find the link to the festival program, including the stream from the Tesař Villa, on the festival website. Questions can also be asked during the broadcast. This year, the twelve-hour festival has the subtitle Housing and the People.

Following the online version of the festival at the end of May, the Open House Brno event will allow visitors access to interesting and otherwise hard-to-reach places. “We are preparing proven locations for interested parties and the opening of more than twenty new sites, which we will gradually reveal on the website www.openhousebrno.cz as well as on Facebook and Instagram. We would be happy to have new interested parties sign up to help with this year's organization, which is solely provided by unpaid volunteers,” added Pešl Šilerová.

Since its inception in 2010, the Open House network has gradually included 50 cities from around the world. They organize local architecture festivals for the public, with selected places visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. The festival appeared online for the first time in 2020 in response to COVID-19 and was viewed by 40,000 people.