An affluent forward-thinking couple in Czechoslovakia builds a house designed by an up-and-coming modernist architect in the 1920s. For ten years the house centers their lives and loves. Then they must flee the Nazis. Others come to the building, now in Soviet times seen as merely utilitarian, but it still touches all who enter. The author brings the people and their lives full circle. Chance and circumstance—what part they have in lives—and history. A beautiful book on its own, made even more poignant as it parallels the lives of a real house and real people, that of Villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in Brno in the Czech Republic.

posted Jul 17, 2010 at 8:52AM

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