The Glass Room: Housing space, time and history

Abstract

This article presents The Glass Room (2009), a novel by the British author Simon Mawer set in Brno, the Czech Republic, as a unique literary portrayal of a historical period and Modernist architecture in fiction. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the novel marked a turning point in its author’s career, inspiring both theatrical and film adaptations, and, perhaps more importantly, it sparked a resurgence of interest in its model, the famous Tugendhat House, a revolutionary piece of Modernist architecture built between 1928 and 1930 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The narration of the novel is determined by the centrality of both the Landauer House and its main living space, the Glass Room, and their capacity to frame the intimate histories of the characters as well as the tumultuous social, political, and cultural developments of Central Europe. The spatial poetics of The Glass Room reflects this thematic complexity, whilst expressing the key aesthetic and ethical preoccupations of Modernist architecture and contribut-ing to the novel’s role in providing a multifaceted insight into history and architecture.