The Glass Room, by Simon Mawer

In the late 1920's, newlyweds Liesl and Viktor Landauer commission a modern home to be designed and built in their native Czechoslovakia by a German modernist architect, Rainer von Abt, who they meet while honeymooning in magical Venice. They reject the old, worn, ornate culture of the past and long for space, light and air -- architecture for a new century. Set on a hill above the old town, the construction is a stunning structure entirely of glass and steel. Ten years later, they are forced to flee to Switzerland and then the United States since Viktor is Jewish. During the war, the house is used as a genetic research lab, where researchers seek to find exact measurements that will define racial types. By the 1990's countries and lives have all been rearranged and the house is becoming a museum. The intertwined lives of those that inhabit it over the years are both deeply realized as very human characters as well as emblematic of the troubled twentieth century. Marred slightly by an almost Dickensian reliance on coincidence, it is nevertheless a very affecting novel of ideas. The Landauer house is based on the real Turgendhat house by Mies van der Rohe in Brno -- now the Czech Republic. The actual "onyx wall," that glowing, changing divide of stone between the areas of the "Glasraum"is just as stunning in pictures as I imagined it while reading the book. 405 pp.