The Zlín Gallery presents unrealized projects by architects for Baťa's Zlín

Zlín - The Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín has on display, starting today, unrealized urban planning studies and designs for public buildings for the Baťa company in Zlín and Otrokovice up to 1945. The exhibition "Unrealized Visions of the Baťa Company" will run until April 19. It is part of events commemorating, in collaboration with UNESCO, the 150th anniversary of the birth of Tomáš Baťa, the gallery's spokesperson Zuzana Bílá informed CTK.

"Thanks to the exceptional growth and prosperity of the Baťa company and the inseparable influence of Tomáš Baťa, Zlín became a modern urban center with a unique architectural style and pace of life during the interwar period. The enormous construction activities of Tomáš and Jan Antonín Baťa, in collaboration with renowned architects, transformed a small town into an agglomeration of more than 40,000 residents. Zlín became one of the peaks of first-republic functionalism and the only consistently built functionalist city in Europe,” the spokesperson stated.

The exhibition will present 50 designs divided into five thematic areas. These include urban planning studies for the Baťa company, the Práce Square, new buildings at Práce Square, sacred buildings and memorials, and public buildings in interwar Zlín. "The installation allows for the comparison of architects' approaches to the tasks assigned as well as the tracking of evolving opinions on individual projects from the investor's perspective – the Baťa company. While under the leadership of Tomáš Baťa, there was a requirement for efficiency with production and public buildings, and the builder relied primarily on the architect F. L. Gahura or the city’s architectural advisor J. Gočár when realizing his visions, his successor Jan Antonín Baťa demanded greater representativeness and globality for company buildings and paid more attention, even outside of his own design and construction department, to renowned figures in both Czech and global architecture,” said the author and curator of the exhibition Ladislava Horňáková.

Over 40 years, the Regional Gallery has acquired extensive photographic documentation, a wealth of archival materials, and collection items that document the development and highlight the significance of interwar architecture in Zlín. "The presentation will introduce the designs of architects František Lýdie Gahura, Vladimír Karfík, Miroslav Lorenc, Josef Gočár, Jan Víšek, Otto Rothmayer, Josef Havlíček, or Bohuslav Fuchs,” Horňáková added. The designs will bring closer the activities of the Baťa company in interwar architecture and visionary ideas for the further development of the Zlín agglomeration, which, however, were not fulfilled due to post-war events.

Guided tours of the exhibition with the curator are scheduled for March 24 and April 14.