Letter from Zlín: the Czech town where capitalism and constructivism co-exist

The first gift I remember receiving from my grandmother was a pair of shoes from Bata. It was the 90s, and although foreign brands were appearing in stores throughout Prague, they were still too expensive for most Czechs — or at least they were for my grandmother, who lived off her pension. Bata — Czech in origin, but by then multinational — was the affordable option. At the store, I picked out a pair of sandals with a floral design. My grandmother drew her lips together in disapproval and said, “jako v komunismu.” The print reminded her of the drab styles of the communist era. She bought them for me anyway.

It turns out you can see a lot of Zlín without ever leaving the comfort of your car. The D49 motorway cuts through the heart of the city, past the Tomas Bata University and Park Komenského. Today’s Zlín feels more like a university town than the seat of an industrial complex. Many of the larger factories have gone (Bata shoes haven’t been manufactured here for more than 70 years) and only smaller manufacturers remain. The newer developments that populate the centre have kept in with Zlín’s characteristic brick masonry, ensuring the city stays awash in the colour red.

For the new housing district, Kotěra designed worker homes that were split into four dwelling units. Aesthetically, Kotěra’s homes bore no resemblance to English housing models. Instead, Kotera looked to garden cities for their use of green space. The Letná neighbourhood was connected to the factory complex and a greenbelt surrounded the entire development. Each home also came with a communal garden meant to help workers transition from their country roots. Bat’a believed that the human mind relaxed better when surrounded by nature and the colour green. (He also forbade the planting of any vegetables in the garden plots to ensure that his workers were resting while at home.)

But if socialist thinking influenced the initial planning of Zlín, it was the capitalist pressure to build faster and cheaper that ultimately drove the city’s growth and design. There is no place better to see the immense city development than by touring the Bat’a family houses. Rows upon rows of these uniform, red-brick houses dot Zlín’s hillside, so much so that they have become emblematic of the city. Bat’a hired Zlín-born architect František Gahura to design the next generation of employee houses after Kotěra died in 1923. But the red brick was used not for aesthetic purposes, but out of necessity. It was found not only to be high-quality but also fulfilled other more practical concerns such as logistics — and cost. “What [the architecture team] searched for was not any special aesthetic design, but standardised production and a highly rational calculation of the cost. That was the driving force behind the architecture,” says Hnídková. In other words, because Zlín was developing so quickly, the developers used brick simply because it was cheap. Bat’a believed strongly in utilitarianism, with one famous quote extolling, “Architects are obliged to build functional buildings, not their own monuments.” One four-floor production hall for the factory was built in 28 days. But while finishing workers completed the top floor, shoe production had already begun on the ground floor. Or, as Bat’a said: “before the building is finished, it has to start making money for itself”.

Bat’a died in a plane crash in 1932, and never lived to see many of Zlín’s developments. But in the years leading up to his death, a paradigm shift in modern architecture was underway. Artists and architects alike were rethinking how to build a better society, and from these ideas new styles were born. One of these new aesthetics was Constructivism, which eschewed ornamentation and embraced rationality, often taking design inspiration from machinery and other logical systems. While nations such as the Soviet Union were drawn to constructivism to wash away the bourgeoise architecture of the past, utilitarian design philosophy took hold in Zlín as a natural answer to the industrial development driven by the Bata Company. Yet while today’s architecture historians use Constructivism to denote this materialisation of rationalism, architects of the time — both in the USSR, and the Czech Republic — would have merely called themselves modernists.

After the war, everything changed. The Bata Company retained its foreign assets, while governments in the Eastern bloc countries confiscated and nationalised Bata factories. The communists, hoping to erase Zlín’s capitalist past, renamed the city Gottwaldov in 1949, after the country’s first communist president. In Zlín, Hnídková says that the shift in ideology is manifested in the architecture itself. “The family houses were replaced by the collectivist houses and the apartment buildings. It’s a radical difference and I think it embodies the vision of living collectively and employing social control of the people more extensively than in the family houses.” Under communism, new collectivist housing in Zlín consisted of prefabricated panel buildings, or paneláky, like the so-called G-houses. The construction of paneláky was similarly driven by a need for large quantities of cheaply built housing. Many actually credit the architects Hynek Adamec and Bohumil Kula, hired by the Bata Company in the 1940s, with inventing prototypic paneláky with their design of prefabricated duplex houses. But regardless of its origin, these high-density apartment complexes shaped Zlín into a different socialist reality than the one it was founded on. By the end of the 1950s, paneláky were developed throughout the country and, for many, have since become synonymous with the dull aesthetic of the communist years.

Shortly after the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, Zlín reclaimed its name and the city experienced a revival. There was a celebration of the “Bat’a myth,” as Hnídková puts it. Despite his socialist beliefs, to Czechs, Bat’a exemplified the capitalist history of interwar Czechoslovakia. Today, Zlín faces the exact opposite of its population-driven boom during the interwar period. Its populace is dwindling to levels previously seen in the 1960s and the city is projected to have the highest percentage of seniors in the Czech Republic by 2050. To prepare for its future, Zlín’s city planners and developers are investing more in student housing, barrier-free access to public transportation, and civic amenities to attract more permanent residents. But what people want and need most are jobs. As the city tries to woo large employers, urban planners can look to Bata and Zlín’s interwar period for inspiration.