(1903-1970)
Grete Tugendhat, a native of Brno, metropolis of the historical land of Moravia, from a German-Jewish family, commissioned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design the famous functionalist Villa Tugendhat, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001. She joined the wealthy Tugendhat family from the even wealthier Brno Jewish business family Löw-Beer. She was a highly educated and enlightened woman and a great lover of art, too. Just before the arrival of the Nazis in 1939, she and her husband Fritz and their children emigrated. Through Switzerland, they gradually reached Venezuela. During her visit to Brno in the late 1960s, Greta Tugendhat expressed her lifelong wish that the villa be returned to its original state, opened to the public and serve as a textbook of modern architecture. After a long time, Greta Tugendhat’s wish came true.