Garden Culture and Modern Living: The Glass House. Vienna 1933. Displaced Visions, published by Park Books, is much more than a monograph on an iconic modernist building. Using the architecture of Hans Glas’s Villa Rezek as a case study, Caroline Wohlgemuth and Maximilian Eisenköck explore the ideals and architectural outlook of a generation that was driven from Austria and consigned to oblivion.
Sandra Hofmeister
Das Glas Haus heute. 25 Fotografien // The “Glas House” Today. 25 Photographs © Stefan Oláh
Five terraces – from the paved garden terrace to the roof, offering views of the mountains of the Vienna Woods. The home of the doctor couple Anna and Philipp Rezek at Wilbrandtgasse 37 in Pötzleinsdorf, Vienna-Währing, brings to life a vision of living that makes light and sunshine part of everyday life. The descendants of the Jewish doctor couple call their grandparents’ house – who were able to flee from the Nazis via London to New York in 1938 – the “Glas Haus” (Glass House), named after the architect Hans Glas, who designed the terraced house in the 18th district.
Caroline Wohlgemuth, Maximilian Eisenköck (eds.), “Glas House”. 1933. Visionary Architecture in Vienna and Exile, with photographs by Stefan Oláh, Park Books, Zurich 2025, → order now
Viennese interior design
The Glass House. Vienna 1933. Displaced Visions documents the history of Villa Rezek through historical photographs and plans, as well as a fascinating photo essay by the Viennese photographer Stefan Oláh. Essays explore the architectural ideals, social entanglements and historical discourse surrounding Viennese Modernism in the wake of Adolf Loos. Following a restitution process lasting several years, the villa was returned to the Rezek family in 1953 and sold shortly afterwards. Since 2010, the Glas House has been a listed building; its rooms have been restored to their original 1930s condition through careful renovation. Today, it can be visited as a temporary museum of modernism, bringing history, architecture and Viennese interior design to life.
Das Glas Haus heute. 25 Fotografien // The “Glas House” Today. 25 Photographs © Stefan Oláh
Healthy spaces
Hans Glas (1892–1969) had attended Adolf Loos’s private school of architecture alongside Richard Neutra, Rudolf Michael Schindler and Ernst Freud, Sigmund Freud’s youngest son. In 1932–33, he designed a villa on a hill in the north of Vienna for the doctor and his wife, Anna and Philipp Rezek, a house that opens out onto the garden with terraces and sliding windows. The villa colony in Pötzleinsdorf was already well known at the time: Adolf Loos had built the Moller House at Starkfriedgasse 19 a few years earlier. Josef Frank, Oskar Strnad and Oskar Wlach had built four small houses with terraces in Währing. The Villa Beer in Hietzing also embodies the terrace concept – following its recent renovation, it too has recently reopened as a museum. After the First World War, pulmonary tuberculosis raged in Vienna. Healthy living modelled on hospital buildings – light, air and sun – were ideals, a consequence of the epidemic, and became significant for the architecture of the Second Viennese Modernism following Adolf Loos.
Das Glas Haus heute. 25 Fotografien // The “Glas House” Today. 25 Photographs © Stefan Oláh
Modernism and the expulsion
The historical context and the emergence of garden culture in the late 1920s are explored in *Haus Glas. Vienna 1933. Displaced Visions is not glossed over, but explored in depth. Alongside various essays that shed light not only on the villa itself and its history, but also on the social and urban planning context of the interwar period in Vienna, Esther Rezek also has her say; as a 15-year-old, she managed to flee from the Nazis together with her parents. “13 March was without doubt the most tragic day in the history of this small country in the heart of Europe, which until recently was called Austria,” she recalls of the day the referendum on Austrian independence was announced on the radio. A few months later, in November 1938, she arrived by ship in her new home, New York, in the early dawn. Hans Glas, who came from a Jewish family, fled to Calcutta in British India in 1938. There he was able to continue his career successfully and never returned to Austria. He died in 1969 at the age of 76 in Lugano, Switzerland.
Das Glas Haus heute. 25 Fotografien // The “Glas House” Today. 25 Photographs © Stefan Oláh
Functional logic
Maximilian Eisenköck concludes the text section of the book with a brief description of a tour of the villa and explains its extensive spatial layout. From the dining area to the guest rooms in the attic and from the private living quarters to Anna Rezek’s workspace, including her laboratory. The functional logic underpinning the spatial layout is evident in Stefan Oláh’s photographs through a clear, minimalist design language that defines modernist bourgeois living.
Caroline Wohlgemuth, Maximilian Eisenköck (eds.),
“Glas House”. 1933. Visionary Architecture in Vienna and Exile
with photographs by Stefan Oláh
194 pages, 17×33,5 cm,
Park Books, Zurich 2025,
ISBN 978-3-03860-446-4
Das Glas Haus heute. 25 Fotografien // The “Glas House” Today. 25 Photographs © Stefan Oláh
Das Glas Haus heute. 25 Fotografien // The “Glas House” Today. 25 Photographs © Stefan Oláh
