Day trip to the Villa Tugendhat, Brno

As promised, a post just about our visit to the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic. The trip was limited to a mere 15 of us, so I certainly felt really lucky to go (especially since the other option involved the Vienna Spanish Riding School...wouldn't go down with my severe allergies). The house did not disappoint. We took a tram up into what looked like a pretty residential spot to find this fantastic modernist building built up the hill overlooking Brno, on a gorgeous sunny day.

So a bit of history (what else?); The Villa Tugendhat was commissioned by Greta and Fritz Tugendhat in 1928 as a marriage gift from Greta's father. The couple were Jewish Germans, who's family had made their wealth from the textiles trade. As a great fan of Mies Van der Rohe, Greta was eager to commission him for her new home on a plot of her father's land in Brno. They began building in 1929, with the entire building made with reinforced concrete and steel pillars going through the house. The building is three storeys, with the family quarters on the top floor, the vast living space below, and the basement which holds the guts of the house, but is now the main exhibition hall of the building. Mies Van der Rohe and Lilly Reich filled the house with exotic and luxurious materials, as well as Lilly Reich's especially designed furniture for the house such as the Brno and Tugendhat chairs.The building was finished within 14 months, but the family with three children only spent 8 years there, before fleeing Czechoslovakia for Switzerland. The house was seized by the Nazis in 1939 and used as an apartment and office, and much of the interiors went missing, probably selling the materials or moving them to other Nazi buildings. During WWII it suffered a lot of damage, and was used as Soviet headquarters for a while.

After the war, it served a few other purposes until being recognised in the late 60s as a building that needed restoration and protection. The final restoration began in 2012, recreating almost all of the interiors thanks to Fritz Tugendhat's personal photographs - thankfully he was a keen photographer, and used one of the rooms in the basement as his personal darkroom.

We had a fantastic tour guide, Magdalena who really knew her stuff and noticed how giddy we were all getting. We could barely get past the heat forming shoe socks (seriously though AMAZING invention, and not like ugly shower caps) before doing Oohs and Aahs and taking photos and videos.

We started outside on the balcony, and in the afternoon sun we had a glorious view of the garden. The minimalist design of the building and its features created some interesting shadows, following the angular lines of the villa. I ran out of film before I could photograph the whole building, but thank God for phone camera's eh (and Instagram!). The little patio had doors into the children's rooms, so the balcony acted as their play/outdoor area. As we went around the house, you could tell that the kids played little into the design of the house, it didn't seem like MVdR like children much...

We first had a tour of the living quarters, which as it goes just looked like bedrooms and studies EXCEPT FOR their bathroom which I immediately fell in love with. The parent's bathroom was this spectacular tiled room with windows in the roof for natural light to come in. But main thing was all of the features, the showerhead, the taps and the sinks are just beautifully formed objects... I promise it wasn't just me, the details really did get to all of us. We were all taking photos of hinges and door stops, which apparently visitors barely notice, so Magdalena spent some extra time pointing out special details in the house. Anyway, if I could have one thing, it would be that damn showerhead. Another favourite was all of the inbuilt cupboards, shelves and wardrobes, all made of the most exotic and decorative hardwoods I've ever seen.

Then we headed downstairs to the living area, the living room of all living rooms which was the majority of the interior space inside the house. It took up most of the middle floor, and looked out onto the garden with four humungous floor to ceiling glass panes, which we soon found out could fully open by mechanically sliding down into the first floor - this of course meant that it opened up into a full storey drop which is not so great with small kids. MVdR refused to put in proper barriers too, so this house was much less a home than a fully fledged design object. The living room was where we found even more details, and where lots of Lilly Reich's furniture lived. Unfortunately I only managed to get the left side of the room before I ran out of film, but I'm relieved to have images of the green chairs and the onyx wall. The onyx wall is one of the few original pieces left in the house, astonishingly surviving the destruction from the wall and from disappearing because the Nazi's built a structure around it to hide it from the Soviet army! It was bright enough on the day we visited that Magdalena showed us the glow that comes through the onyx in the evening by closing the blinds; the onyx glows fluorescent orange and pink, which just made it completely magical.

On the other side of the room (which I didn't get pictures of) there was a huge round black table with something like 20 chairs around it. All along I thought it was a conference table, but turns out it was also meant to be the dining table...I can't imagine a family of five using it, but it was nevertheless beautiful. It was framed by a curved ebony wall, open at one side for the view, and all the chairs contrasted the black table and dark walls in white veal leather - each chair took three baby cows to make, which made me a bit sick as to how decadent they were. They had around 50 chairs...thats a lot of cows.

The last part of the tour took us downstairs, which aside from an exhibition area, explored all the workings of the house. The house still uses its original air conditioning and heating system which was insane that something from the 1930s, using very basic physics, still worked in great condition. It brought fresh air from the outside, cooled and filtered in back up into the house, and in winter could heat it up to keep the house warm. Through a series of doors we reached Fritz's dark room, which is completely empty of things because ironically there is little documentation of the room he was probably most in! Most impressive of all, through the dark room was another room which turned out to be Greta's fur fridge - I kid not, a fridge just for her fur coats and accessories. However, it is important because its the only place in the house with the original tiles, which given the amount of tiling that was in the house, it's impressive that they were missed when the others all disappeared or were destroyed.

We were hoping to hear a little more about Lilly Reich, as by Thursday (especially after Hundertwasser) we were a bit sick of dominant male visionary designers, who block the importance of the people who worked with them. We ran out of time to really discuss it, but Lilly was the one who picked much of the materials for the interiors, as well as the colour schemes and designing the furniture. It's a shame that she gets little recognition for the Villa, especially because the interiors were so impressive, and as bold and decadent as Mies Van der Rohe's architecture. I'm hoping I'll have time over the summer to look her up a little more, and maybe come across an exhibition or two on trips to Germany.

It turned out Brno has a lot to see, so we hope we can return there to discover a little more!

Vienna: A Trip and some Photographs

So I did say that I was going to write a blog everyday... and I have been but they might be posted in other places first so I thought I'd save them to be safe!

The good news is, is that I finally got three of my films developed (yay!) so I have some more new images! For the most part the two films had photos from our trip to Vienna, and some others were even from Japan (!?!) which I feel like its a bit too late now to post here so I'll be gradually putting them up on my photography blog. It doesn't have much of a following but I like seeing them somewhere together, and to be honest its mainly good memories rather than seriously considering them as artwork. I think it's a good way to tell stories and keep track of time somehow.

 We were in Vienna back in April (a scarily long time ago...) which was a relief after spending so much time by ourselves working on the second term essay. By then we already knew each other pretty well, so actually it was perfect time to take a trip and let off some steam. We left on Monday morning to arrive around lunchtime to orientate ourselves. In the afternoon we were taken on a tour around the famous (or infamous) Ringstrasse, Vienna's 18th century take on modern city planning. What we got from it was that yes, Vienna comes across as very very very rich. The architecture in the centre is predictably flamboyant and austere. An interesting note was that buildings were built 'in-the-style-of' to reflect the function of the building. For example, the Austrian Parliament Building is in the classical style for its references to democracy and justice. You could say it was sort of the post-modernism of its time, very flashy indeed. Much of the centre of Vienna is like this - large blocks of historicism pretty much everywhere. Some of the buildings destroyed in the war were replaced with 50s filler buildings, which I have to say, I preferred a lot more.

 The next day we split into two groups, and I joined the Vienna Historical Museum option in the hopes of learning some more about Viennese history which...is very heavily edited in the Museum. Much of the permanent exhibition focused on the elite and the bourgeoisie, and more about their leisure time and wealth than of Austrian or Viennese history. We spent the morning exploring the exhibition, and the highlight was finding a ridiculous object called a giraffe piano, which is like if a baby grand and an upright piano had a child. Google it, it's a sight to behold. Maria had just written her essay on the gendered use and display of pianos, so we presented that in our collective round up of the visit. We felt that giraffe pianos were one of the few even middle-class items on display, that encompassed the leisure and musical education of pianos, but also an object that was space-saving and decorative in itself.

 In the afternoon we met the other group to see the Beethoven Frieze in the Secession Building. It was very cool and peaceful inside, and it goes without saying that Klimt's frieze was a sight to behold. Many a postcard was purchased of it. We split for dinner after that, and Charlotte and I were keen to visit the MAK, seeing as we wouldn't have been able to catch it at any other time. It turned out that the MAK was open late and free entry that night, so we headed for the Josef Frank 'Against Design' exhibition, and the 'Fashion Utopia's' exhibition. The Frank exhibition was particularly impressive, showcasing his architectural models, loads of his furniture (whole and parts), and the best part for me was a wall with a big selection of his textiles with the drawings and plans displayed alongside. It had been a long time since I had really looked at illustration and surface pattern, and it made me really want to pick it back up again. It's a long time since I've really done any drawing, I had meant to draw whilst in Vienna but just didn't manage to get into it. There was a lot of running around to do, so I figured I would stick with taking photos but I do regret it a little that I didn't...maybe one day I'll be brave enough to get back into it properly.

Wednesday we split up again, and I had chosen to go the Hundertwasser House and the Museum. A weird anomaly in the sea of austere buildings, the house was sparkling, colourful and really beautiful to look at. Ironically, across the road was a pastiche 'market house' in the style of the Hundertwasser House but shoved full of tacky Vienna souvenirs. Obviously the house had become a bit of a tourist trap, and we talked about how the house had been perceived by the neighbours, how much it cost, and the relationship between Hundertwasser and the architect who made it happen (which had of course turned pretty sour). We went to the museum as well, and although I enjoyed his prints and textiles, I wasn't sure about the feel of the museum, and how it was almost propaganda-like about Hundertwasser. 'Ego-White-Man-Visionary' became a bit of a recurring theme on the trip in the end...

In the afternoon we went to visit a panopticon held inside the university called the 'Narrenturm' or 'Fool's Tower' that was built in the late 18th century. This is essentially a cylindrical hospital/prison for mental patients, but is now a medical museum. It was difficult to imagine as it was under construction, so we couldn't see the whole thing from the inside, but the idea was chilling enough. We then ventured out of the first district in Vienna for the first time to visit Karl-Marx-Hof, one of Vienna's most famous social housing complexes. Until then, I had only imagined Vienna to be like the Ringstrasse, so it was quite refreshing to see something that was not 'luxury' and elite, but more descriptive of the everyday. We were given an invigorating tour by the Karl-Marx-Hof Museum's keeper, with the Museum now housed in the old communal Bath house, although below is still a communal laundry area. It turns out that Vienna's social housing system is (or at least sounds) awesome, and made us all even more resentful of living in London. But most of all, the complex itself is beautiful, modernist in style but still brimming with life and activity, especially with the two kindergartens built inside the complex. Definitely worth venturing out for!

The long day was finished with an Adolf Loos walk in the first district again, a highlight of which was a quick nip to the Loos loos for 50cents, and finishing off in the Loos American Bar, where I had a killer cocktail martini with absinthe in it, which tasted a bit like swimming pool.

But by far the best was saved until last. Again we split up, this time for the whole day, where a lucky 15 of us went out to Brno in Czech Republic to visit the Tugendhat House by Mies Van de Rohe. Yet another Ego-White-Man-Visionary, but the house was nevertheless breathtaking. I feel like I have to do another separate post on it because I have too many pictures, and too much to gush about it. But I will say we had the absolute best tour with our guide Magdalena (follow her on Instagram here - she's also an amazing painter!) and the whole time we were all just in a dream - it helped that it was a gorgeous day and we could lay out in the sun looking at the beautiful building. Afterwards we went for a walk around Brno and we decided we could have spent a week there instead of Vienna... but maybe we'll visit next summer together. We invited Magdalena for dinner with us and had a delicious spinach strudel (so tasty and cheap!) before hopping on the train back to Vienna.

The next morning a group of us decided to have a lazy morn eating delicious pancakes instead of squeezing in any more of Vienna. I think Vienna would have been an even better destination had we ventured further out to discover more of the everyday history, and perhaps more of the global aspects of Viennese design (it exists! Even if they deny it!). But otherwise, I think we all really enjoyed spending some time together looking at lots of shiny shiny things.

Everyday in Modern Asia

Again a break from the blog thanks to lots and lots of things going on...but I am hoping to blitz through the six planned blogposts this week so I can catch up with everything that I've missed! There's lots of exciting projects going on at the moment, which is good news, so hopefully I can remember everything in due course!

But seeing as it's fresh in the mind, I'll start with the more recent. You might have guessed from Twitter that I had my second option of the term, called Everyday in Modern Asia. The course basically does what it says on the tin, but with an extra element - we also looked at the 'everyday' represented in the Museum, and seeing what we could extract out of the objects on display.

The week began with discussing the reading, which aimed to ask 'where is Asia', and how can museums really represent 'Asia'. We tried to deconstruct the ideas of East and West (what's in between?!), and how much of this categorisation totally limits our ideas of ethnicities, of the 'Other', and solidifies stereotypes that somewhere in time, space and history has been constructed. But then, how does the museum, especially those built around collecting 'other', expand from their collections and 'subvert', or rather revert, the objects within them in order to tell a new story. One of the questions was whether anybody can really 'authentically' represent the 'Other', so we discussed how maybe a better way is to bring together new narratives to create dialogues in their audience, rather than dictate an ethnographic rhetoric.

One of the objectives for the rest of the week was to work in groups of four to research a particular Asian object in any of the V&A galleries in relation to the everyday and modernity. Our group (Sophie, Olivia, Melissa and I) went for a set of lacquer inrō from the Japan Gallery. In the groups we needed to prepare a Soapbox presentation and a blogpost for publishing somewhere tbc...

The set is by a famous Edo period lacquer artist, Shibata Zeshin, and from around 1865. The collection is made up of twelve inrō, and represent one for each month of the year (in order top to bottom, left to right). We were intrigued by the completely different designs, and also what they were actually used for. The label described them as Japanese male fashion accessories, that were highly sought after by the Western market after Japan opened its doors to the world. They are all beautifully and intricately decorated, we all immediately picked a favourite. We were also keen to write about two key interests within the group - fashion and collecting - and inrō seemed like a perfect choice.

An inrō is a miniature stacking box, originally used for storing identity seals and medicine. Beginning as quite a humble object for carrying small items, they surged in popularity in the 17th century as a utilitarian item. Inrō are actually only one component of an essential accessory for the wealthy Japanese man - the inrō is hung from a cord and secured to an obi by a netsuke, with the separate parts boxes held down and together by a bead called an ojime. This is when it emerged what a netsuke was originally used for; we had always thought they were miniature carvings, highly sought after by Westerners in the 19th century. Netsuke were in fact decorative fastenings, a crucial part of a moneyed man's outfit. Inrō, even at the height of their production, were always costly investment objects. They might be related to the modern day designer handbag, or Rolex watch.

However, as well as quality, it was also about the quantity of inrō that a wealthy Japanese man owned and displayed on their body. The inrō served a social purpose in a time when social hierarchies prevailed and sumptuary laws prohibited conspicuous displays of extravagance. Inrō became a canvas for wealth, decadence, taste and fashion that could easily be hidden behind a kimono sleeve if necessary. The fashion was competitive, giving rise to an explosion of production of high quality inrō ensembles. Men enjoyed exhibiting wit, poetry and style through clever combinations of imagery through the inrō, the netsuke and their kimono, adding to the theatre of their social gatherings.

My favourite was the 8th inrō, a design in the style of an ink cake with a purposely distressed aesthetic, apparently 'worn and chipped' in areas (see the Search the Collections entry here). It is apparently referencing Japan's beautiful moon this time of year, where one write poetry and drank a lot of sake - sounds good to me! We're hoping to be able to research a little further into individual inrō from this set for the blogpost, so I'm looking forward to getting my teeth into this one.Also I somehow spontaneously signed myself up to live-tweeting the whole thing, which you can follow up on my Twitter. I'll be in to process of writing up a proper blogpost for the class, which I will subsequently share on here later on I'm sure!

Now when I said Soapbox presentations, I really mean we had a soapbox, which we brought right into the galleries on Thursday evening to present to our class (and the public) our interpretations and research on the objects on display. Amongst the objects chosen by other groups were a 1992 'My First Sony', an East India Company print, and a lacquer 'Sainsbury's Organic Mango x 4' tray. Nobody else really joined us (it was quite late and almost closing time), but we had a lot of fun, and we all felt quite refreshed to be able to work on something non-European (at last!).