Moravian Square and the Interwar Capital
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Transcript
Between the world wars, Brno became a major administrative and cultural centre of Czechoslovakia’s Moravian lands. New housing, exhibition grounds, universities and functionalist architecture transformed the expanded city.
The interwar state promoted Czech institutions, but Brno remained socially mixed. Jewish industrialists and professionals were important patrons of modern architecture and design.
That world was destroyed under Nazi occupation. Jewish residents were persecuted and deported; property was seized. After 1945, the vast majority of the German-speaking population was expelled or forced out in the violent post-war reordering of Czechoslovakia.
Those ruptures are essential context for Villa Tugendhat. Modernism looks clean in photographs. The society that commissioned it was anything but simple.