SPECIFIC ARCHITECTURE / ABSTRACT ARCHITECTURE
BARCELONA PAVILLION / TUGENDHAT HOUSE
LILLY REICH / LUDWIG MIES VAN DER ROHE
TREATISE ON SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS
Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe were one of the most successful, but also one the most mysterious among lover couples in the history of world architecture. The influence of Lilly Reich on the sudden onset of radicalism of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the concept of modern architecture, the manner of their cooperation in the German Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Barcelona in 1929, and the Tugendhat House in Brno in 1930, feature more guesswork than science-based knowledge. The actual share of Lilly Reich on many exemplary buildings and exhibitions by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is also basically just subject of speculation.
The first part of the lecture will be devoted to a summary of what we do not know, and why, and the extension of what we believe to be new speculation. The second part of the lecture will focus on the strange fact that although the Barcelona Pavilion and the house in Brno were actually designed and built at the same time, and they in fact form one ideological whole, historians of art and modern architecture did not yet carry out any serious attempts to illustrate and analyse this unique phenomenon in the history of architecture. The ideological unity of both buildings and the uniqueness of this bond lies in the fact that it is a dialectical continuity from abstract architecture to specific architecture, the continuity of a residential building to an exhibition pavilion.
Jan Tabor
Born in 1944; an architecture theorist, curator of exhibitions, cultural journalist, co-founder of the Forum of Experimental Architecture in Vienna and a ‘Kunstkolchoz’ art colony in Mikulovice near Znojmo. He is currently working on a project called “Urbo Kune, the Capital of the United States of Europe” and the urban opera “One Day and One Hour in the Urbo Kune” which will be presented at the “Seven Bridges” festival in Cologne in May 2015. Together with students of Arts at the Masaryk University in Brno he is preparing an exhibition called “A Set of 2, Overloaded Spike” for the ‘Kunstkolchoz’ art colony in Mikulovice. He lives in Vienna and in Mikulovice near Znojmo.
The lecture will be held on Monday, 1 December 2014 at 5 p.m. (A tour of the villa is not part of the lecture).
The lecture will be IN CZECH.
This last lecture in 2014, a year which was devoted to lectures by foreign experts, will be preceded by a small piano concert in the main living room of the villa.