Paula Arning presented the paper ‘Without the Intervention of Women’: Lilly Reich’s Spatial Practice at the Tugendhat House at the Design History Society Annual Conference 2026, ‘Design in an Age of Uncertainty’, on 3 September 2026, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic.

‘Even today, one can say without fear of contradiction and without in any way violating the truth of the matter that our art, our painting, our architecture, our applied arts and even modern handicrafts would be exactly as developed as they are, even without the intervention of women.’ Robert Breuer’s 1915 claim that women contributed nothing to modern design exemplifies the systemic dismissal that shaped women’s exclusion from design practice and historical memory. Lilly Reich’s work at the Café Samt und Seide (1927) and the Tugendhat House in Brno (1928–1930) proves him wrong. While working as a textile designer, navigating a field more accessible for women than the profession of architecture, Reich’s interventions applied spatial effects. At the Café, velvet and silk formed walls and became the architecture itself, while at Tugendhat House, her curtains, room dividers and upholstery were not decorative supplements but spatial instruments: they structured interiors, modulated light and acoustics, absorbed odours, guided movement and shaped how modernist space was experienced. Reich’s work challenges the distinction between
interior architecture and interior design, showing that textiles could perform architectural functions conventionally reserved for permanent, built elements. This paper examines Reich’s collaborative role at the Tugendhat House and asks how textiles functioned architecturally within Mies van der Rohe’s design. Rather than treating collaboration as erasure or marginalisation, it explores the constraints and possibilities of their working relationship. Close analysis of material choices, spatial organisation and visual sequencing reveals how textiles articulated relationships between body, architecture and environment and created fluidity within the building’s rigid structural framework. The study repositions textiles and women’s design labour as central to modernist spatial practice, demonstrating how Reich’s commitment to a ‘feminine’ field of practice shaped modern interiors and the circulation of modernist ideas through material work.

https://arthistory.phil.muni.cz/media/4224668/booklet.pdf