Zlín: modernist architecture, bustling industry and big personalities
In a country famed for its well-preserved medieval towns and beautiful historical architecture, Zlín stands out as something of an outlier in Czechia. You won’t find any Gothic cathedrals or Baroque chateaus in this Moravian city – but fans of 20th-century architecture certainly won’t be disappointed.
If you have already travelled a fair amount around Czechia you may have noticed that Zlín is interesting precisely because of its uniqueness within the country. Walking around the city, you almost feel like you’re not in Czechia anymore. Although you won’t find many old castles or monasteries here, what you will find is a thriving, bustling industrial town, with some interesting and unique gems of 20th-century architecture.
The industrial face of Zlín was largely sculpted by pioneering businessman Tomáš Baťa, who built up his shoe empire in the first three decades or so of the 20th century. With its square red-brick buildings, the city’s former industrial zone, where Baťa shoes used to be produced, smacks of an American manufacturing city like Detroit.
And this is no coincidence – Tomáš Baťa built the factory buildings according to plans that he brought back from America with him. However, as Lenka Čechmánková from the Museum of south-eastern Moravia in Zlín explains, most of the factory buildings nowadays are not the original ones from Tomáš Baťa’s time.
“Zlín was bombed in 1944 during the Second World War and a lot of the buildings here in the factory area were either completely destroyed or very badly damaged. So some of them had to be torn down and new buildings were built instead, and these new buildings are a bit different from the original ones.”
Red-brick “skyscraper”
Indeed, although Tomáš Baťa can certainly take credit for shaping the city’s look, some of Zlín‘s most iconic buildings, such as the red-brick “skyscraper” in the former industrial district, were actually built after his death.
“Right now, we are in building number 21 in Zlín, which nowadays serves as the headquarters of the Zlín region’s administrative and financial offices. But originally, this building was meant to serve as the headquarters of the Baťa company. This was where the head of the company had his office, and in the 1930s, when this building was built, that was Jan Antonín Baťa.”
Jan Antonín Baťa took charge of the company after Tomáš Baťa died in a plane crash in 1932. He was Tomáš’s younger half-brother by 22 years – the two shared the same father but had different mothers.
Although called the “skyscraper”, nowadays the building probably wouldn’t meet the criteria to be classified as such – modern sources usually define skyscrapers as being at least 100-150 metres in height.
“The building has 16 floors and is 77 metres tall, so when we compare it to the skyscrapers of today, it’s not that impressive. But at the time, it was the second tallest building in Europe.”
The building was also very modern for its time, containing four elevators and a paternoster – a chain of cabins that goes around continuously in a loop, meaning you have to get on and off while the lift is in motion.
The “skyscraper” was built to accommodate the expanding needs of the company – by 1935, the firm employed about 2,000 office workers and it was decided that they should all be in one place, so a new headquarters was built.
“Each floor in this building was designed as an open-plan office for 200 people, with some exceptions – for example, the eighth floor was divided into individual offices for the directors. The 16th floor is a rooftop, with a rooftop garden and fountain, and nowadays there is also a coffee shop which didn’t use to be there originally.”
Elevator office
However, by far the biggest attraction in this building is the office of Jan Antonín Baťa himself. Lenka Čechmánková tells me that it is also an elevator as well as an office, which I assume must be a mistake or a mistranslation – until we step inside the office, where she presses a button and the whole room starts moving.
“Right now we are in the office of Jan Antonín Baťa, which is also an elevator. The office measures 5 metres by 5 metres, it weighs 5 tons, and it moves 70 centimetres per second.”
Except for the control panel next to the desk and the number display above the door indicating what floor the room is currently on, it looks like an ordinary office – it has a desk, a chair, and two telephones (one for domestic calls and one for international calls). It also has an air conditioning unit in the ceiling and, quite incredibly, there is a sink in the corner – with running water, both hot and cold.
“The running water was made possible by the fact that there was a water tank for fresh water above the elevator and a water tank for wastewater below the elevator, and it all moved together.”
But the million-dollar question, of course, is why would Jan Antonín Baťa have needed a moving office? Lenka Čechmánková says the story goes that he wanted to check up on his employees to see if they were really working, the idea being that he would stop on each floor, open the door, and scan the room to check. But, she insists, this story can’t be true.
“There were 200 people on each floor – the idea that he would just open the door and see if all of those 200 people were working is just impossible. Also, there are numbers above the elevator door on each floor that indicate where the elevator is, so people would be able to see that the elevator was moving and that it was coming to their floor, so they would already know that he was there even before he could open the door.”
The real reason for the moving office, she says, was efficiency.
“If he wanted to talk to someone, he could just go to the floor immediately, he didn’t have to wait for them to come to his office. I think that was the idea behind it.”
The grand irony of the moving office is that Jan Antonín Baťa never even got to use it – it was completed in December 1939. By that time, however, Baťa had already left Czechoslovakia, fleeing the Nazi occupation – first to England, then the USA, and finally settling in Brazil. He never returned to Czechoslovakia, living in Brazil for the rest of his life, where he established a number of Baťa towns including Bataiporã, Bataguassu, and Batatuba, all of which still exist to this day.
Once we have reached the 16th floor of the building via Jan Antonín Baťa’s moving office, we emerge out onto the rooftop, from where the entire industrial zone can be viewed, including buildings number 14 and 15, which nowadays house a museum, art gallery and library, but used to be where the Baťa company’s shoe production took place.
Incidentally, Lenka Čechmánková explains why the buildings all have numbers.
“The numbering system is inspired by America – the first number indicates the position of the building in the factory area from east to west, and the second number indicates its position from south to north. That means that this building, number 21, is second from the east and first from the south in the factory area.”
Zikmund’s villa
While most of Zlín’s architecture, like the buildings in the former Baťa industrial zone, is highly functionalist, not all of it is purely so – there are also examples of striking modernist architecture that has an aesthetic element to it. And there is no better example of this than a building on the edge of town which Dagmar Výlupková shows me around.
We are now in the Zikmund villa, which has been open to the public since autumn 2022, following the death in December 2021 of legendary Czech traveller Miroslav Zikmund, who bought it in 1953 and lived in it for almost 70 years. Miroslav Zikmund is known to the generation of Czechs who lived under communism as a great adventurer whose expeditions with his friend Jiří Hanzelka around far-flung corners of the globe helped bring the outside world a little closer to home for Czechs during the first two decades of the communist regime.
The pair travelled through Africa, Latin America, Oceania and Asia on two separate trips, during which they carefully documented and recorded their journeys in order to later turn them into books, films and radio reports. Miroslav Zikmund and Jiří Hanzelka were not only friends, colleagues and travel partners, but also neighbours – Hanzelka’s villa is just behind Zikmund’s villa and can be viewed from the garden.
Zikmund’s villa itself is beautiful and striking – both inside and out. The villa was designed in 1933, but as Dagmar Výlupková, head of the Zikmund Villa Endowment Fund, explains, there is a bit of a mystery surrounding the architect.
“What is curious is that we don’t know who precisely designed the villa. We think it was František Lýdie Gahura, because at that time he was the Baťa company architect, but the architectural drawings aren’t signed, so we can’t say with certainty.”
The interior was redesigned by architect Zdeněk Plesník in the 1950s, after Zikmund bought the villa. Dagmar Výlupková again.
“The villa is unique in that it is completely authentic. Miroslav Zikmund lived here for 70 years and the interior and furniture have been kept exactly as he designed it and left it after his death. He entertained many well-known guests here, for example, Václav Havel, and I think each person that visited left a distinct mark here. The place has a special atmosphere.”
After Zikmund’s death, the Zikmund Villa Endowment Fund endeavoured to keep the villa exactly as he had left it, giving it a “still lived-in” feel. The rooms are filled with tokens and souvenirs from his travels.
“As you can see, we are in a space that is furnished for everyday life. We left everything so that visitors could view it as it was when Mr. Zikmund lived here. Jaromír Hanzlík (a Czech actor) came to visit, and he asked as a joke when Mr. Zikmund was coming back from town – because the villa really looks as if he had just popped out somewhere and will be back at any moment.”
The place is also filled with a vast library of books in several languages. As Dagmar Výlupková explains, Hanzelka and Zikmund would prepare extensively for their trips beforehand, studying maps and learning the languages of the places they were going.
“Mr Zikmund spoke seven languages. I heard – I don’t know if it’s true or not – that he and Mr Hanzelka would divide the languages they needed to learn between them before they embarked on a trip. So they spoke the usual European languages – English, German, French, Spanish, Russian – but they also learnt less common, non-European languages.”
Dagmar Výlupková says that Mr Zikmund’s logistical skills can be seen even in the way he designed the villa.
“You can see how carefully and thoroughly he prepared for his trips – Mr Zikmund was very good at planning and organising, and you can see that even in the villa itself. The house is a model of sustainability – if you look around, you could still live in it today. The design, the functionality – it’s built to last.”
The villa is available for pre-booked tours on designated days, but not only that. As Miroslav Zikmund himself intended, the Zikmund Villa Endowment Fund has also kept it open as a meeting place for cultural events.
“Mr. Zikmund didn’t want the villa to turn into a museum, in the classic sense, after his death. He wanted cultural life to continue here, for people to gather and have discussions here, artists, philosophers, historians. So we try to have in-person gatherings where we invite well-known people from the Zlín region or even from the wider Czech Republic to hold lectures and discussions here which are open to the public, so local people from Zlín can come.”
Zikmund’s villa, as well as providing another example of Zlín’s interesting modern architecture, also highlights two further notable points about Zlín – first of all, as well as being a centre of industry, it also has a rich cultural life, and secondly, it was the birthplace of or home to a number of prominent Czech personalities. In addition to the Baťa family and Hanzelka and Zikmund, the Olympic medal-winning long-distance runner Emil Zatopek also called it home for a while, and it is the birthplace of former US President Donald Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump (née Zelníčková).
Velehrad and Kroměříž
Although the city of Zlín is characterised by its 20th-century architecture, it would be misleading to suggest that this is the only kind of architecture you can find anywhere in the Zlín region. Outside of the city itself, there are plenty of examples of older architectural styles, such as the Romanesque Basilica of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and Saints Cyril and Methodius in Velehrad, an important Catholic pilgrimage site, and the Baroque Gardens and Castle in Kroměříž, a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The castle was the representative seat of bishops and archbishops of Olomouc for more than three centuries. These men bore the title of Prince of Moravia until 1918, when the use of noble titles in the Czech lands was abolished with the establishment of the First Republic. They often hosted distinguished guests at the castle, such as Russian Tsar Alexander III, or Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I and his wife Sisi, who are all pictured in portraits hanging in one of the chateau’s rooms, the Tsar’s room.
Tereza Dufková, head of guided tours at the Archbishop's Chateau, as the Kroměříž castle is officially known, explains how this room received its name.
“This room was given to the Russian Tsar Alexander III when he came to have a meeting with Austrian Emperor Franz Josef I. This was a big event for Kroměříž – like if the Czech president had a meeting with the president of the United States nowadays. The date of the visit was 25 and 26 August 1885. There are a lot of books about this meeting – we know what they were wearing, when they arrived, what they ate – but nobody knows what they spoke about here.”
Nowadays, the chateau doesn’t receive many royal visitors, but it does receive another kind of distinguished guest – film crews and movie stars. Several well-known films and TV series have been shot there, particularly in what is undoubtedly the most beautiful room in the castle – the Assembly Hall, which Dufková describes as “the jewel of this chateau”.
“We had Netflix in here about a month ago, who were making the second season of (hit German series) The Empress, and Czech TV was also making a movie in here. I often ask visitors if they’ve seen the movie Amadeus by Czech director Miloš Forman, because many scenes were shot in this assembly hall. Maybe a quarter of the movie was made here.”
The assembly hall also serves other cultural purposes, for example, concerts. Tereza Dufková says that for the past month benefit concerts have been held in this room every Tuesday. And you can see (or rather hear) why – the acoustics are amazing.
“I also often ask people to sing here – I give them an opportunity to sing us a song, because the acoustics are so good.”
When I ask her if she ever sings in the room, at first she says she only does it when she’s on her own. But with a bit of coaxing, I manage to convince her to give us a song.
I had never been to the Zlín Region before this trip, and didn’t know what to expect from a place that is mostly famed for its industrial history. But I have to admit, I was more than pleasantly surprised – I was impressed (and not just by Tereza’s singing). This less-than-typical Czech city and the surrounding region offers the seasoned traveller a refreshingly unique cultural, historical and architectural experience, unlike any I’ve had anywhere else in Czechia.
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