Already on 12 January Villa Tugendhat had the honour of being the venue for the preview of the “Refugee Committee and Central European Architects, 1938–1941” research database, which will be presented by the Royal Institute of British Architects in London in February 2026. Guests were welcomed to the villa by Iveta Černá (Head of Villa Tugendhat), together with an introduction by architect professor Petr Pelčák. The database itself was then introduced by Valerie Carullo, RRC Project Manager and RIBA Chief Curator of Photographs, and Irena Žantovská Murray PhD, HonFRIBA, former Director of the British Architectural Library and RIBA Collections.
The project, which has received significant support from, among others, the Brno City Museum’s Department of the History of Architecture, traces the activities of the RIBA Refugee Committee, which received more than 200 individual applications between 1938 and 1941, mostly from architects in Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary). The resulting groundbreaking online database, which will be unveiled in London in February 2026, will chronicle the individual fates, lives and work of these individuals.
