From vernacular to modern architecture

This last week was all about the countryside. On Monday, we visited an open air museum located about an hour from Prague by bus. It was a mini-village with mannequin inhabitants in ancient buildings from different periods. Some of the structures had been moved there from their original towns to preserve them. Heavy timber, whitewash stucco, tiny punched windows, stone walkways, and eyebrow dormers dominated.

On Tuesday, we set off on the train for an extended stay in the countryside. Half of our group, I wasn't one of them, stayed in this cottage in Dolni Lisna. Technically, my group was in Horni Lisna (Upper Lisna) a beautiful quarter-mile walk uphill from there. We gathered firewood from the forest to roast meat over an outside grill (metal grate spanning two rocks). I didn't eat, but I like campfire. It wasn't that rustic, we had showers and toilets and kitchens with electric stoves. There were even televisions.

Friday, a bus took us into Brno. We stopped at a famous crematorium, and we were told its name and the architect's name, but we were there for literally ten minutes, and couldn't go inside, so I have no idea who or what it was, but I wasn't impressed with the outside. In the afternoon, we went to the Tugendhat House by Mies van der Rohe. It was incredible, but mostly for the front room (the one where the windows roll down, electrically, like in a car. This was built in 1929!) and the entrance hallway. The front room, with the marble separator and the little hot house on the side could be a studio apartment for me. I would live right there in the sunshine, looking out over the garden, lounging in a Barcelona chair. The entrance hallway has ten or eleven-foot dark-wood doors, diffuse light from a curved frosted-glass wall, which makes the chrome railings and hardware glow, and beige travertine floors. The effect is extremely difficult to reproduce in photographs or renderings. I have not liked Mies previously and the scale of the house is overdone, but those two rooms plus the bathroom with a mirror wall and clerestory windows, would make a cozy residence.