The Restoration(s) of Kamil Fuchs presents the most widely acclaimed part of Fuchs’s work – his heritage-sensitive renovations – through selected renovations and adaptations of listed buildings in Brno. These projects were drafted in collaboration with his team from Studio 20 at the Brno branch of the State Institute for the Renovation of Historic Towns and Listed Buildings (SÚRPMO).
The most important of these projects was the renovation of Villa Tugendhat (1981–1985). Officially completed on 23 August forty years ago, it earned Fuchs’s team a silver medal at the 1987 World Biennale of Architecture in Sofia.
A second part of the exhibition looks at other important projects realized by Fuchs’s team in Brno. Special atttention is paid to the heritage-protected Měnín Gate, which was adapted for cultural uses in 1972–1983. This subject takes on added relevancy in view of the gate’s currently ongoing renovation. Other exhibited projects include the renovation of the expansive grounds of Old Town Hall, the Velký Špalíček housing block, and the Petrov Hill terraces.
A separate segment of Fuchs’s architectural work consists of interior designs for wine bars, restaurants, and clubs in heritage-protected settings, whose inventiveness can today be admired in period photographs. All these interiors have since disappeared, just as Fuchs’s architectural traces are disappearing all over Brno.
The exhibition at Villa Tugendhat is part of the exhibition and publication project The “New World” of Kamil Fuchs, which symbolically follows on the earlier exhibition The New World of Bohuslav Fuchs and Rudolf Sandalo. This new “intervention” into the permanent exhibition The New Brno: Brno Architecture, 1919–1939 presents four chapters in the work of Kamil Fuchs. The section titled Collaboration focuses on joint projects and competitions by father and son Bohuslav and Kamil Fuchs. Architectural Alterations looks at Kamil Fuchs’s renovations of his father’s buildings, thus reflecting an interesting situation in which Kamil did new interiors for Bohuslav’s modernist works of architecture. The third chapter, Nurturing the Legacy, explores Kamil Fuchs’s designs for his father’s gravestone and memorial plaque. And the final section of the exhibition at Špilberk Castle presents a generally unknown aspect of Kamil Fuchs’s work – his Fine Art, provided exclusively on loan just for this occasion.
More information about the exhibition The “New World” of Kamil Fuchs at Špilberk Castle can be found here.
Exhibition opening
Wednesday 13 August 2025, 18:00
Exhibition duration
14 August – 12 October 2025
(accessible without reservation Tue–Sun, 10:00–18:00)
The exhibition is situated on the technical ground floor of Villa Tugendhat.
Exhibition authors
Barbora Benčíková, Jindřich Chatrný, Michal Kolář, Filip Kyrc, Lucie Valdhansová
Architectural and graphic design
Studio Pixle
Contributors
Barbora Benčíková, Jindřich Chatrný, Michal Kolář, Filip Kyrc, Lucie Valdhansová
Proofreading
Kateřina Havelková Štěpančíková
Translation into English
Stephan von Pohl
Photographs
Vladimír Buček, Miloš Budík, Josef Čoupek, Jiří Dobrovolný, Zdenka Jandusová, Jitka Kučerová, Vilém Reichmann, Adolf Rossi, Vladimír Uher
Realization
Studio Pixle
Study and Documentation Centre – Villa Tugendhat
Department of the History of Architecture
Special acknowledgments
Brno City Archive, Zuzana Blazec, Pavel Ciprian, Dagmar Černoušková, Michal Hančák, Josef Janeček, Jarmila Kutějová, Petr Odehnal, Jiří Pikous, Jaroslav Sedlák, Pavla Seitlová, Michaela Těžká