Daniela Hammer-Tugendhatová has passed away

Brno - On Wednesday, the Austrian art historian Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat passed away, the youngest daughter of the Tugendhat couple, who built the famous villa in Brno's Černá Pole. She was 79 years old. CTK confirmed this today, reported Iveta Černá, the head of the Tugendhat villa.

"The news came directly from the family. I will always remember Mrs. Daniela as a very educated and noble lady with a melancholic smile, who tried to bring the legacy of her parents and especially her mother, to whom she was very attached, into life," said Černá.

Daniela Hammer-Tugendhatová was born as the youngest of the children of Greta and Fritz Tugendhat in August 1946 in Caracas, Venezuela, where her parents emigrated to escape the Nazi regime.

She studied art history and classical archaeology at the universities of Bern and Vienna. In 1975, she graduated under Professor Otto Pöcht at the University of Vienna with a thesis focused on the historical interpretation of the principles of composition in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. After her habilitation at the University of Oldenburg, she began collaborating with the University of Vienna in 1994 and became a permanent professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

In 1969, she accompanied her mother Greta to Brno, where she had the opportunity to visit the former family villa for the first time. Together with her husband Ivo Hammer-Tugendhat, she became the main spokesperson for the Tugendhat family concerning the protection of the villa and its future use, and she actively contributed to the restoration of the villa as a historical monument. In 2015, she was awarded the City of Brno Prize in the category of international cooperation.

The functionalist villa, which Daniela's father, textile entrepreneur Fritz Tugendhat, had built in the late 1920s, is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site, having been inscribed in 2001 as the eleventh Czech monument. The house, designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, began construction in June 1929. It is often referred to as a building that set new standards for modern living and is considered one of the fundamental works of modern architecture worldwide.