Architect Vladimír Karfík helped give a face to Baťa's Zlín

Prague – Architect Vladimír Karfík, who died on June 6, 1996, at the age of 94, helped to give face to Baťa's Zlín from the early 1930s, and later taught his successors at the technical university in Bratislava for many years. His most famous work, sensitively reconstructed a few years ago, is the Zlín skyscraper, the former headquarters of the Baťa company, with a unique executive office located in the elevator. However, Karfík also designed other buildings, from villas to swimming pools and even a film studio.

Karfík was born on October 26, 1901, in Idrija, Slovenia, into a family of a Czech doctor. However, as a small child, he moved with his parents to Prague, where he studied architecture at the Prague Technical University and the Academy of Fine Arts after World War I, with Jan Kotěra among his teachers. In the second half of the 1920s, the young architect gained experience abroad, working with the best. He first interned at Le Corbusier's studio in Paris, and then worked in the USA with Frank Lloyd Wright.

The economic crisis affected architects as well, so at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, Karfík earned a living as a graphic designer in Chicago for a time before meeting Jan Antonín Baťa. Baťa came to America to open new stores – and back to Europe, he brought a talented architect. Vladimír Karfík, alongside ten years older František Gahura (also a student of Jan Kotěra), got involved in building Baťa's empire – not only in Zlín, which Baťa wanted to transform into a modern city.

Karfík designed stores and entire department stores for the company in Prague, Liberec, Bratislava, Brno, or Amsterdam; he participated in designing factories, workers' houses, and homes for the company's top management. In 1934, he became the chief architect of the company, and a year later he designed film studios on the outskirts of Zlín near the village of Kudlov – in places with an unobstructed view – complemented by houses with apartments for filmmakers. The pinnacle of his Baťa career became the Zlín skyscraper number 21, which was completed in 1938.

Vladimír Karfík worked for the Baťa company until the end of World War II. After a conflict with the communist leadership of the nationalized enterprise, he moved to Bratislava in 1946, where he taught at the Faculty of Architecture for a quarter of a century. However, he did not abandon designing; he experimented with panel construction, was involved in the establishment of the Závod míru housing estate in Bratislava, and is credited with the chemical technology faculty building, the University of Economics building, and the extension of Comenius University in the Slovak metropolis.

At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, Karfík taught for four years at the technical university in Malta, and after returning from the Mediterranean island, he settled in Brno, where he built his own house. He continued to teach and lecture, and in 1993 he published – initially in Slovakia – his memoirs, in which he critically reminisced about the management of the Baťa enterprise. Vladimír Karfík remained active well into old age, and in 1994 he contributed to making the Brno Tugendhat Villa accessible to the public.