The Building of Interwar Zlín : Its beginnings and period of greatest development

Abstract

The years 1924-1925 saw the beginning of a rebuilding of the factory, which had so far expanded spontaneously, and prompted the establishment in 1924 of the Baťa Company's construction division. A new type of standard factory hall was designed with 39 structural blocks and the basic construction unit of the reinforced concrete frame was set at 6.15x6.15 m, following the contemporary American standard of industrial construction. The first development plan for Baťa's industrial compound, called "Garden Factory," was designed in 1924 by architect F. L. Gahura and arranged edifices measuring 20 x 80 m each into a geometric network. Gahura also began to extend this construction pattern - designed originally for factory halls - to public buildings throuh various modifications in combination with brick and glass facades. The factory and town were developed in the spirit of the construction division's slogan "Quickly - well - economically." The radical overhaul of the factory and the consistent planning of the town's rapid development were preceded by the early zoning proposals of the leading representative of Czech modernist architecture, Jan Kotěra. In the years 1916-1918, he became the first architect to direct the company's activities in urban development. The successful entrepreneur and investor Tomáš Baťa, after his election as Zlín's mayor in 1923, began to execute his plans to build a town that would meet the needs of modern man. In his speeches he spoke of a city for 50,000 people. From the mid-1930s, Zlín's rapid expansion required the construction of schools, dormitories, social care institutions, hospitals and other public facilities. These bore the character of the corporate industrial architecture with a unified system of reinforced concrete frames combined with various types of brick and glass facades. The rapid pace of Zlín's development and the accelerating growth of its industrial production posed significant challenges for its builders and architects. The construction boom necessitated generous urbanistic solutions, which gave the town its urban and architectural shape. In 1930, individual zoning and development proposals were merged and Tomáš Baťa established a special zoning department for Zlín. This marked the beginning not only of the systematic expansion of the town but also of a wave of dynamic economic and cultural development throughout the region. The development of Zlín, which was conceived in the interwar period as a town in gardens, was closely connected to the Baťa Company's production premises which lay at its center. To this day it bears the indelible and distinctive traces of the company's specific conception of architecture. The character of development grew organically out of industrial construction so that we can refer to the city's industrial aesthetics and its industrial model for the organization of life. Over the course of less than thirty years, a notable change in socio-economic conditions took place here. Thanks to the activities of the Baťa Company, Zlín became one of the most significant centers of interwar architecture in the Czech lands and the only consistently developed Functionalist city in Europe with an unmistakable and completely original character.