This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Greta Tugendhat fled Czechoslovakia with her family in 1938, first to Switzerland and then, in 1941, to Venezuela, leaving behind the house in Brno's Černá Pole district that she had specifically wanted Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to design. She did not see it again for more than three decades. On January 17, 1969, she returned to Brno for the first time since the family's flight and delivered a lecture titled Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Creator of the Tugendhat House, at the Brno House of Arts. She wrote the lecture first in German and then personally translated and delivered it in Czech, a choice that speaks to how deliberately she approached the return: this was not a casual visit but a considered act of reclaiming, in her own words and in the language of the city she had lost, the story of a house that had by then spent decades under state control after being seized by the Gestapo and later nationalized. The lecture is regarded today as an important primary source for the villa's history, one of the few first-person accounts by someone who had actually lived in the house and who could describe both the reasoning behind its design and what it meant to be forced to leave it. She visited the house twice more in the late 1960s, a marked contrast to her husband Fritz, who never returned to Brno after the family's 1938 departure and died in 1958 without ever seeing the villa again. Greta Tugendhat died in 1970, not long after her return visits and the lecture that preserved her own account of the house's origins, leaving behind one of the clearest surviving records, in her own voice, of what it meant to have built something and then to have had it taken away.