What happens when one of the most iconic modernist houses becomes a public museum? Access, once restricted to a single family, must now be considered for everyone. Villa Müller in Prague, designed by Adolf Loos in 1930 for the Müller family and now under the care of the Museum of Prague, recently opened its doors after more than a year and half of reconstruction, with new tour routes previously off-limits to visitors.

Villa Müller in Prague

During the opening press conference at the end of September, the Director of the Museum of Prague Ivo Macek and Winy Maas also presented to the media a new book “(T)Raumplan: How to All Access the Villa Müller”. The bilingual publication by the Museum of Prague and The Why Factory explores the very question of accessibility using the prime example of Adolf Loos’s intricate Raumplan.

The publication “(T)Raumplan: How to All Access the Villa Müller” was presented during the opening press conference of Villa Müller

The book builds on a research project developed by The Why Factory in collaboration with the Museum of Prague and students from the Faculty of Architecture at Czech Technical University in Prague, led by MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. The project investigates how the villa’s complex spatial organisation can be made more accessible while preserving the qualities that make it one of Loos’s most important works.

Villa Müller is an especially challenging prototype. Its interconnected rooms, arranged across different levels according to Loos’s Raumplan, create a three-dimensional sequence of spaces, but also present significant barriers to physical access. Rather than treating accessibility as a question of simply inserting a lift or ramp, (T)Raumplan asks how adapting, shaping, and questioning the existing architecture could generate new possibilities.

The book presents 23 speculative interventions, ranging from elevators, ramps, and moving platforms to more radical proposals involving kinetic architecture, robots, drones, and virtual reality. The proposals are deliberately broad, testing the limits of what might be possible rather than offering a single solution. Alongside the design experiments, contributions from historians, designers, students, and museum experts consider how different bodies and abilities experience architecture, and what it means to make a historic building genuinely public.

The title (T)Raumplan combines Raumplan with traum, the German word for dream. It reflects the project's ambition to imagine how Loos’s revolutionary spatial concept might be adapted for the centuries to come, while retaining the complexity that makes it unique.

(T)Raumplan is the 15th book in The Why Factory’s Future Cities series. The bilingual Czech-English publication will be available soon through the Museum of Prague’s online shop.

MVRDV Founding Partner Winy Maas with the (T)Raumplan publication