Villa Rezek Restored, Now On View: 1930s Viennese Modernism by Architect Hans Glas

There’s a quality to a well-restored historic work of architecture that is unmatched—the marriage of early twentieth century materials where edges are refined with an updated structure and surfaces refinished with real consideration. Villa Rezek, built between 1933 and 1934 in Vienna for physician couple Anna and Philipp Rezek by the largely unknown Jewish Viennese architect Hans Glas, is one such example. Set on Windmühlhöhe in Währing, Vienna’s 18th district, near works by Adolf Loos and Josef Frank, the house exemplifies Viennese Modernism in the interwar period: a reinforced concrete structure with generous openings, clean lines, and expansive terraces. It’s a building that is both staunchly modern and unmistakably humane—an architecture of optimism amid a turbulent era.

Its recent restoration, undertaken between 2020 and 2024 by Maximilian Eisenköck Architektur, approaches the house as a layered document. The firm’s research-driven approach combines archival study, material analysis, and the precise attention to building history, chemical composition, and traces of original use. This allowed the villa to be returned to its 1930s condition without erasing its past. That past is substantial: the forced flight of the Jewish Rezek family in 1938; postwar occupation by American military generals; partial destruction; and the eventual protection by the Federal Monuments Office in 2010. Newly reopened as a temporary museum in spring of 2025, Villa Rezek offers a rare, intimate encounter with modernist domestic life—rooms restored with original furniture, photographs, and plans, where even absences feel present. It is also a quiet corrective: a reintroduction of Hans Glas, long overlooked in Austria, into the architectural lineage he helped shape.

Photography by Julius Hirtzberger for Maximilian Eisenköck Architektur.

For more profiles on historic architecture, see our posts:

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• Daring Color Ideas to Steal from the Finn Juhl House in Copenhagen
• 12 Design Lessons from Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge