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Obsolescence and the Fate of Zlín
by Daniel M. Abramson
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For much of the twentieth century, architectural change was imagined as the process of obsolescence, new superseding old, devalued and made expendable. Architects and others both embraced and recoiled from shared perceptions that obsolescence characterized modernity, imagining short-life buildings on the one hand, insisting upon permanence on the other. A history of obsolescence is sketched here and the theme’s relevance is explored in relation to Zlín’s past, present, and future. ‘Look upon Zlín as a growing town, where even tomorrow you will no longer find what was considered good enough today,‘ the company’s official 1936 guidebook states (Cekota 1936: 6).
It was around 1910 that the term obsolescence was first applied in English to architecture, to help explain the unusually short lives of structures like the 92 m Gillender Building in New York City’s financial district, only thirteen years old upon demolition. It had reached the ‘limit of its commercial life’, explained one real estate executive, ‘no longer able to earn a proper return on the land it stands on’ (Evers 1914: 58). This phenomenon of ‘financial decay’ was explored by the engineer Reginald Pelham Bolton in his 1911 book Building for Profit: Principles Governing the Economic Improvement of Real Estate. Bolton listed obsolescence’s basic causes, all extrinsic to the building itself: ‘the influence of fashion’, what we might call style obsolescence, as well as ‘change of habit, competition, development of new territory, and shifting of the centres of population and business’ (1911: 75.). Bolton also hypothesized that different functional types of buildings obsolesced at different rates. His table, the ‘Economic Existence of Buildings’, assigned the longest-life banks lives of 44-50 years, down through offices and hotels, to the shortest-life ‘tax payers’ – small structures erected to cover tax payments on a valuable site until a more lucrative building could be con- structed – 12-15 years (ibid. 76). Bolton’s approach was theoretical, based on experience and intuition more than research. Next came more empirical investigations of obsolescence, compelled by the new US federal corporate income tax introduced in the mid-1910s, which included deductions for the cost of physical depreciation and also economic obsolescence, enabling building owners to report less taxable income and thus lower their tax payments to the federal government. But the tax code did not standardize a rate of deduction, leaving open the questions: What should be the rate of deduction? What would be a building’s legally-recognized ‘lifetime’?
Into the breach stepped the Chicagobased National Association of Building Owners and Managers (NABOM). Invited by the federal authorities to submit figures for building lifetimes and deduction allowances, the Association produced in the 1920s and early 1930s a series of surveys and ‘autopsies’ of demolished Chicago buildings that analysed the architectural factors of obsolescence and suggested plausible building life spans. For example, the heavy base and formidable piers of the thirteen-storey Women’s Christian Temperance Union office building (completed 1892, demolished 1926, see image above) expressed architecturally the structure’s durability, but economically, NABOM’s research discovered, reduced rentable interior space and decreased window areas, views, and sunlight, thus diminishing the offices’ desirability for tenants and the building owner’s income (NABOM 1927). The manager of the Tacoma Building, another demolished Chicago landmark explained: ‘Although the building was earning an adequate return on the investment, the return figuring present market values of the property was very small’ (Holcombe 1929: 32). The building owners association also gathered data showing that fourteen major Chicago structures, demolished between 1902 and 1932, had possessed an average age of only 32 years upon being wrecked. This figure was the basis of the Association’s request to tax officials for ‘recognition of the fact that 30 years was the average expectancy of life of a new building’ (Anon. 1930: 108).
The building owners just about got their wish. In 1931, the Bureau of Internal Revenue published tables of depreciation and obsolescence allowances for commercial buildings categorized by mode of construction. The shortest life of 20 years was proposed for wooden mills and warehouses; the longest of 50 years for fireproof homes and stores. Roughly in the middle came office buildings: 40 years if fireproof, 25 if wooden (U.S. Treasury Department 1931).
The mythic figure of the building life span
The real estate industry’s political achievement had been to turn the extreme cases of obsolescence in Chicago into standards of the U.S. tax code, benefiting building owners nationwide. The conceptual achievement was to rationalize a central contradiction of capitalist development, paradoxically to both preserve past investments and clear the ground for new investment. Obsolescence as a theory of change renders this chaotic, self-destructive process as predictable, inevitable, progressive, and quantifiable, condensed into the mythic figure of the building life span – mythic, since of course structures don’t disappear at a certain age. The broad cultural achievement of NABOM’s campaign for short-life recognition, reported in the national press, was in effect to invent the idea of architectural obsolescence – that a building’s value was representable in time and money, inexorably declining and rendering demolition inevitable – and then to have this theory accepted as a popular myth, resonant in an American consumer society where the Detroit automobile industry conceived of the annual model change in the 1920s and marketers promoted notions of ‘progressive obsolescence’, as one expert put it in 1929, ‘a readiness to “scrap” or lay aside an article before its natural life or usefulness is completed, in order to make way for the newer and better thing’ (Frederick 1929: 4). By the 1930s, the term obsolescence had become ubiquitous in the fields of real estate, finance, and city planning. A 1935 bibliography lists 125 articles related to the subject (Jameson 1953).
By contrast, it should be noted outside the United States, in Great Britain for example, where an older, nineteenth-century tax code did not allow obsolescence deductions for buildings, no such similar discourse on architectural obsolescence appeared in the interwar years. Differences between national architectural cultures can hinge on the arcana of tax policy.
The term obsolescence was also applied in mid-century to American cities, particularly working-class districts deemed substandard in public health and environmental terms and so designated for wholesale demolition, as seen in a 1951 planners’ map of Boston’s doomed West End entitled ‘An Obsolete Neighborhood’ – a clearance technique that was also obviously political (Boston City Planning Board 1951, see image p. 158). Residents were largely powerless to resist the technocratic objectivity and impersonal scientism of the urban obsolescence paradigm, which used checklists and mathematical formulae to triage urban environments, deciding which would survive and which would perish.
Architects, too, fell under the spell of obsolescence, especially in the decade of the 1960s. ‘Ours is an age of change, of dynamism, of unrest, of revolution’ (Zuk and Clark 1970: 11), declared American academics in 1970, ‘marked by an irresistible acceleration of obsolescence,’ asserted an Italian designer in 1968 (Nicoletti 1968: 415). ‘Nowadays almost every building becomes obsolete before it is ready to fall down,’ observed a British researcher in 1963 (Cowan 1962-3: 72). Obsolescence seemed architecture’s sure fate. But the rhetoric was repetitious and clichéd, offering little insight. Rather than through writing, it would be in design where architects explored most complexly the implications of obsolescence for architecture.
Flexibility as a tactic against obsolescence
Throughout the century, architects’ prime tactic against obsolescence has been ‘flexibility’ and the ideal antidote, the open-plan factory shed: universal internal adaptability versus obsolescence’s degradations. The factory shed model was adapted, too, for multi-storey structures. Hospital and laboratory buildings of the 1960s and 1970s feature one clear-span floor stacked atop another with all obstructive servicing packed into interstitial levels, allowing maximal adaptability. This interstitial principle was spectacularly externalized and verticalized at Paris’s Centre Pompidou (1970-7, Piano and Rogers; see image p. 160) where all mechanical services are located upon the exterior to represent the flexible loft structure, to fix obsolescence practically and symbolically within a monumental frame. As the architect Renzo Piano declared: ‘Beaubourg wasn’t built for 20 years, but 300, 400, 500 years’ (Silver 1994: 180). In another museum variant, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin (1962-8) has all of its quotidian functionality precipitated downward into an enclosed podium so as to leave visible above only an ideal, clear-span, infinitely flexible glass-and-steel open hall: the symbolic essence of the factory shed, obsolescence absorbed within a perfect frame (see image p. 161).
The factory-shed solution to obsolescence, however, had its critics, on both practical and symbolic grounds. Complete internal flexibility was unnecessary and expensive, the look of finished monumentality inappropriate for dynamic institutions. Instead, the English architect John Weeks proposed an ‘indeterminate architecture’ as the best ‘solution to the problem of obsolescence’, exemplified at his Northwick Park Hospital (1961-76), the largest and most expensive health complex of its day in Britain (1964: 507). Northwick Park was designed to be morphogenic, that is, capable of changing its total shape in order to remain adaptable and therefore immune to obsolescence. The loose-jointed site plan allows individual units to be demolished without disturbance to the whole, or extended at their ‘growing end’, with unfinished exterior elevations featuring demountable fire stairs and removable steel panels anticipating extension. Northwick Park possessed, Weeks wrote, ‘no final plan’, being ‘forever unfinished’ (see images above and left).
Along with the ‘unfinished’ as a solution to obsolescence went the idea of deliberate short-life buildings like the English architect Cedric Price’s unbuilt Fun Palace project (1962-7), described as a ‘a short-life toy of dimensions and organizations’ (1968: 129). ‘Nothing is to last for more than ten years, some things not even ten days,’ explained Price’s collaborator about this complex of towers, cranes, and temporary enclosures for activities of group and individual self-exploration (Littlewood 1968: 130-1). Accepting the principle of expendability underlay, too, Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt (1964-6), an unrealized educational network of rail-linked teaching and residential nodes in England’s West Midlands, formerly the centre of national pottery production (a postindustrial situation not dissimilar to Zlín). Price’s images of the project seem to be representations of the process of obsolescence itself, simultaneous demolition and reconstruction – modular parts hoisted in and out of openframework structures, dominated by an adapted remnant of the obsolete industrial world – the factory gantry crane.
A morbid sympathy for the obsolete particularly haunts Price’s imagery for the Potteries Thinkbelt Hanley housing area (see image p. 164). Across the bridge, new living units inhabit an abandoned mining pit and ring the bases of the looming waste piles. The most substantial structures are an old, derelict shed and the slag heaps themselves. Here is sombre submission to the obsolete, profound recognition of the age of obsolescence. In a world governed by expendability, the waste of the past will come to weigh down the promise of the future.
And so it has come to pass. Today we worry less about progress than waste. Obsolescence has given way to its opposite and successor term, today’s ruling paradigm, sustainability, the conservation rather than expendability of natural and cultural resources. Under the heading of sustainability we can group not only ecological, green building strategies, but all other tactics to reverse obsolescence and revalue the obsolete that emerged in the 1960s – that great decade of engagement with obsolescence – from historic preservation laws and the profession of facilities management to adaptive reuse techniques and heightened interest in vernacular architecture and urbanism. Today we might say that obsolescence has itself become obsolete. We don’t think first of demolishing old buildings; we try to revalue them.
Here is order
What then is the relevance of this history of obsolescence to Zlín, this long arc from obsolescence to sustainability? To begin, we can ask how change was conceptualized and managed in early twentieth-century Zlín, within the Baťa organization’s ideology of growth and harmony. In Tomáš Baťa’s words (Cekota 1936: 112): ‘The greatest ideal of the true owner of a small enterprise is the longing for growth . . . Let us look upon our present humble business as only temporary.’
Baťa’s expansion of Zlín was conceived in the same way, a site of constant progress, the new continuously superseding the old. This ideology of progress and change was situated within the particular economic and social project of the Baťa enterprise. As a business, the Baťa system was all about efficiency of production, with scientific accountancy and constant self-revision measuring the performance of each individual working unit and centralized control of entrepreneurial dynamism, yet still flexible enough to become a global network of factories and shops in the 1930s. At the same time, the Baťa system was also about the constancy of its brand in order to market coherently its kaleidoscope of products. Planned dynamism characterized the Baťa enterprise. As a complementary social project, the Baťa enterprise was more conservative and static: paternalistic and patriarchal, based on the traditional family structure as embodied in the single-family housing estate ideal, aiming for discipline and harmony. How then was this utopian ideology – utopian in its desire to harmonize the dynamic and the static, the economic and the social – embodied in architecture? How did Zlín’s built environment account for change? And did obsolescence figure in this accounting, new superseding old? Famously, the Baťa architectural system is characterized by its standard 6.15 m structural frame module, glazed and infilled with brick according to its particular function. Such standardization allowed for efficient, flexible construction and planning, also evidenced in the characteristic open- plan loft interiors, adapted in innovative fashion to the Building No 21 office tower (Karfík, 1937-9, reconstructed 2003-4, see Bergmann and Pastrnek, this volume, p. 72) – the whole work floor cleared of obstruction, services and circulation projected to the edge. This was a very advanced office building plan for its days when most services, for example in New York’s skyscrapers, were centrally rather than peripherally located. This internal flexibility allowed in theory for the Baťa office to be reconfigured in a weekend, warding off obsolescence by enabling the architecture to adapt to organizational change (Jenkins 2007: 255).
Factory floor planning and modular standardization imply capacities for change and potential growth in the total building envelope. But at Zlín, the composition of the Baťa buildings belies the potential for change. Instead, the compositions appear finished in the traditional manner: symmetrical, centralized (nearly always an odd number of bays long, usually thirteen), and bracketed by thicker piers at the end, seemingly inexpandable, to meet unforeseen contingency. Rather than expressing the potential for change in the face of obsolescence, the way that modular standardization was deployed at Zlín represented a more or less conventional aesthetic of finished completion, or as Le Corbusier wrote of the Baťa type (Cekota 1936: 137): ‘All have the one-sided skeleton that combines diverse parts into a harmonious whole.’
Moreover, the planning concept of the Zlín factory complex implied a fixity seemingly inadaptable to unforeseen change. Not only are the factory blocks arrayed in a rigid, orderly geometry and even spacing that disallows reformation and addition, but the famous overarching principle of a ‘factory in gardens’ has the effect of corseting each building in a mature landscape setting that appears to disallow flexibility to adapt to circumstance and thus to ward off obsolescence. Zlín is a fixed campus. As observers wrote (Pokorny and Hird 1947: 68): ‘Here is order.’
Just heaps of bricks and concrete
But then where is change? And how to understand this physical fixity for such a dynamic enterprise? Much depends on how architecture was conceived of within the Baťa system: as a largely inert tool and symbol. Listen to Tomáš Baťa: ‘Buildings are just heaps of bricks and concrete . . . It is the people who breathe life into them’ (Pokluda 2005: 26). Of course these ‘heaps of bricks and concrete’ had to function efficiently and also, in their consistent modernism, symbolize the Baťa enterprise’s own self-conscious modernity. What the architecture of Baťa’s Zlín was not conceived of as doing – as ‘heaps of bricks and concrete’ – was to function and be conceived itself as a commodity or asset in the American model. Baťa’s architecture was not ostensibly valued for its financial or exchange value, an object itself of investment or exchange on the market, like a pair of shoes, and therefore subject to rapidly and unexpectedly fluctuating values, like an American office building or even Henry Ford’s factories, which were in practice treated as disposable. As an historian has noted, Ford saw his buildings as expendable, from the multistorey loft buildings of Highland Park (1913) to the single-storey sheds of River Rouge (1930), he was ‘more willing than many industrialists to abandon an old building and build a new one’ (Biggs 1996: 6).
By contrast, Zlín’s buildings appear as durable tools and symbols, not fleeting assets or commodities, and in this of course Zlín was unexceptional in interwar architecture, avant-garde modernism included. Although, for example, the Italian Futurist calls for ‘expendability and transience’ (Sant’Elia 1957: 138), its leading architect’s monumental designs, no less than Le Corbusier’s, expressed what the latter called ‘a profound projection of harmony,’ ‘a sure and permanent home’ (Le Corbusier 1986: 48, 263). The German Bauhaus director Walter Gropius explained (1965: 54): ‘We aimed at realizing standards of excellence, not creating transient novelties.’ European avant-gardes oscillated between ‘intoxication’ with modernity ‘and the fear of breakdown and obsolescence,’ writes architectural historian Antoine Picon (2000: 78). In Zlín, the Tomáš Baťa Memorial (Gahura, 1932-3) represents an apogee of early modernist monumentality: a serene, perfectly proportioned box – now with six long bays to double the three short, split internally into two equal halves. The Baťa Memorial magically transmutes fragile glass into eternal form.
Yet these are surface impressions of Zlín’s architectural relation to change and obsolescence, based upon analysis of visible form. What about beneath the surface? Might ideas about obsolescence have figured elsewhere in the Baťa enterprise and the construction of Zlín’s built environment? How did the Baťa organization account for changes in and the values of its built environment? Were buildings’ performances analysed and measured? How were buildings financially valued, and were losses accounted for in terms of physical depreciation and economic obsolescence? These are research questions that could help us discover deeper links between obsolescence and Baťa architecture.
Indeed, the architectural historian Radomíra Sedláková has recently asserted that Tomáš Baťa did in fact project a twenty-year life span for his company’s houses and factories built in the 1920s (2009; p.c.). Baťa, explains Sedláková, believed that beyond twenty years technical advances in the internal systems would render the buildings obsolete, and so the company should plan for them to be torn down and replaced. Indeed, Tomáš Baťa disliked ‘perfect looking buildings’, according to Sedláková, because this indicated builders’ excessive care for the short-life structures. This is remarkable thinking for its time, evidence outside the American context for an engagement with obsolescence, and it would be interesting to know, or speculate, how Tomáš Baťa arrived at this conception and this figure of twenty years.
Moreover, were different types of buildings valued differently over time by the Baťa enterprise, especially the difference between factories and stores? How was change managed over time in the national and international network of stores? Were the stores, in fast-paced urban shopping districts, modernized to keep up with competition? As sites of marketing, were the stores themselves conceived of as commodities, subject to quickening vagaries of fashion, competition, and expendability, like the wares sold within? By contrast, what happened to the older factories at Zlín, and why? Were they adapted or demolished as newer factory buildings came on line?
What in general was the conception of the relation between new and old in Zlín? Was the older city fabric considered obsolete, superseded, expendable, or did it retain some value to the Baťa enterprise? As architectural historian Rostislav Švácha (2009) argues, Tomáš Baťa was deeply antagonistic towards Zlín’s existing built environment and urban values, expressing the wish for an earthquake to wipe away the old and noting ruefully: ‘We build obsolete houses that will strangle and suffocate the next generation.’ It should be noted, however, that much of old Zlín survived the Baťa era, especially around Peace Square (náměstí Míru). How did these streets and buildings resist the devaluation of obsolescence? What does their exceptionality tell us about the limits and politics of obsolescence?
And, we might speculate, what would have happened at Zlín without the Second World War and its aftermath? How might the city’s environment have evolved if the Baťa enterprise had continued evolving as a Czech-based conglomerate, but with globalized production? Would Zlín have become an administrative centre, obsolete as a site of production? Would Jan Antonín Baťa have fulfilled his late brother Tomáš’s prophesy and would the company really have begun demolishing its buildings on their twentieth birthdays? And why did the buildings and the overall planning not look like they were expendable and adaptable? Or are the individual factory building units separated precisely to allow easy replacement?
The history of the Baťa environment in Zlín has become a history of post-war reconstruction, attrition, and growth, adaptive re-use (e.g. of the Tomáš Baťa Memorial into a concert hall in the 1950s) and now preservation, in the fine refurbishment of the landmark Baťa administration building, Building No 21, for the Zlín Regional Government, completed in 2003-4 by Ivan Bergmann, Ladislav Pastrnek, and Petr Všetečka. How since 1945 has the obsolete been valued, devalued, and revalued? By whom, for what purposes, and following what design strategies? Perhaps most interesting is the recent repurposing of the pre-war Building No 23 factory block into the Business Innovation Centre (2005-6, P. Mudřík and P. Míček). The iconic brick-and-concrete structural frame has been not only refurbished and augmented, with projecting bronze bays, but also attrited, so that broad empty voids appear in the upper floors and shrinkage within the historical frame (presumably to accommodate diminished spatial requirements and modern environmental equipment) (see Všetečka, this volume).
A willingness to let go of the past
In conclusion, what can we learn about Zlín from its architectural history, seen through the lens of obsolescence? First may be the inherent contradiction between modernity and utopia. The former is a ceaseless market-driven process of change; the latter, by contrast, is a vision of harmonious stability. From this vantage, Tomáš Baťa’s true modernistic utopia was perhaps not Zlín’s built environment, but rather the conceptual illusion that he and his enterprise could actually manage the future, project twenty-year life spans, and hold off unpredictable contingency. The Baťa architecture’s apparent inability or unwillingness to represent its own mutability – its look of permanence masking its intended transience – expresses perhaps the insurmountable contradiction between modernity and utopia, between ceaseless dynamic capitalism and dreams of harmony.
The most pertinent lesson for Zlín’s future development might be in the refurbished Building No 23: the impulse not only to preserve and update the past, but also a willingness to let some of it go. Expanded to the scale of Baťa’s Zlín as a whole, this vision would allow some of the older factory blocks to be demolished, within a visual environment more or less consistent with the geometry, scale, and palette of the early twentieth century. Attrition would acknowledge Tomáš Baťa’s desire for short-life buildings and paradoxically represent an act of genuine conservation, a keeping of faith with the creator’s original intention. Allowing simultaneously for preservation, growth, and attrition embodies a flexible attitude toward past, present, and future, in contrast with traditional historic preservation’s straitjacketing principles and regulations, which implicitly deny the future the right to make its own different choices.
Beyond the myths of modernity and utopia, of Baťa and Zlín, there is a more complicated history and reality of tension not resolution between order and dissonance, as Zlín’s architecture suggests and as the sociologists Annett Steinführer, Lucie Galčanová, and Barbora Vacková rightly contend (see Steinführer, Vacková and Galčanova, this volume). They have called attention to points of dissent and disaffection against the governing myth of Baťa and Zlín’s beneficence (Steinführer 2009; Galčanová and Vacková 2009). Likewise, architectural history should question, not confirm our myths. This would make the past more complex, which would in turn give us today more, better opportunities for change tomorrow.
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Daniel M. Abramson
Daniel M. Abramson is associate professor of modern architectural history and director of architectural studies at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where he teaches the history of modern architecture. He holds degrees in English literature (Princeton, A.B.) and art history (Harvard, M.A., Ph.D.) and is the author of the books Building the Bank of England: Money, Architecture, Society, 1694-1942 (2005) and Skyscraper Rivals: The AIG Building and the Architecture of Wall Street (2001). He is currently working on a project on the history of obsolescence in twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. He is the recipient of a Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (London) Senior Fellowship (2008) and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (2007-8), among other prestigious awards.
Der Textauszug ist Teil der Publikation „A Utopia of Modernity : Zlín“. Eine Publikation von Zipp - deutsch-tschechische Kulturprojekte. Herausgegeben von Katrin Klingan in Zusammenarbeit mit Kerstin Gust. Berlin: JOVIS Verlag, 2009.
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