How Černá Pole Learned to Live Modern

Villa Tugendhat is the celebrity here, but the neighbourhood is more interesting when you stop treating it as a solo act. On the slope above Lužánky, Brno's oldest villa colony began in the 1860s. Houses were enlarged, inherited, remodelled and reinterpreted as ideas about privacy, status, comfort and modern life changed. This seven-stop walk starts with the Löw-Beer estate, moves through the colony's nineteenth-century experiments and ends at Tugendhat. The point is not to call everything modernist. It is to watch a neighbourhood slowly invent different versions of modern living.