Villa Müller, Prague

A 10 minute stalk around an Adolf Loos classic

I was in Prague for a conference, for one day in the summer of 2018. I always try to escape a conference at some point, no matter how good it is, in order to explore the place around it. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve been known to accept a conference invitation if it’s in a city I wanted to see. If it’s a bad conference, I get to see a lot of city that way.

But this was a decent conference, and a flying visit, so I had barely any time at all. I walked around the centre for a couple of hours the evening before, and then after my speech, and before the airport, I decided to try to fit in a visit to Villa Müller, a significant modernist house designed by Adolf Loos, located in the suburb of Stresovice, just outside the city centre.

I started trudging out of the city centre across the river, before checking the time and realising I needed to hop into a cab. I just about managed to communicate the location to the taxi driver, even though Google Maps was less than precise (yet better than in Beijing) and the building is somehow both visible from the main road beneath and yet at an oblique angle that is not obviously accessible. That main road features a pleasingly grassy tram line down the middle, leading back down the hillside towards the centre.