An initiative of the
Zlín – Modernity Fulfilled
By Regina Bittner
Along with its exclusive focus on shoe production, Zlín has also lost its distinctiveness.
That is not a drawback. The factory buildings built in 6.15 x 6.15 meter grids are not empty but filled with scores of small firms, ranging from machine-building through to the rubber and plastics industry. Since the 1990s Zlín bears the title “entrepreneur city”, a reference to the success of some of the firms located here who have managed to gain a foothold in the global market in times of social transformation. František Lydie Gahura’s generous urban planning offers sufficient space for the meanwhile mobile citizens: entrepreneurs, service providers, and students of the new Thomas Baťa University. The “city of functionalism” is undoubtedly an important legacy, and yet the city authority is not striving to conserve this heritage through some form of “musealization”, but rather to keep it alive by finding new uses. For this reason, an application to be listed as an UNESCO world heritage site has been scraped: the possibilities to develop further would be severely restricted. Advertising material also talks about the “city in the garden”, for after all the forests of southern Moravia are at the doorstep and many a cottage is nestled in lush green surroundings.
What Zlín is and what it wants to be is less clear today than it has ever been in the city’s history. Has the stronghold of shoe production, which Tomáš Baťa, the “Czech Henry Ford”, wanted to turn into a modern ideal city in the shortest possible time, become a contemporary city after all?
Zlín: “city of functionalism” – hardly any other city in the Europe of the 1920s entered into such a symbiosis of city and factory, location and corporation. Zlín is doubtlessly a model city of Fordism. The expansion of the Baťa business demanded a massive immigration of a work force from rural areas. The corporation’s own housing estates for its blue and white-collar workers were developed in its construction division, and these are characterized most notably by a basic universal model: 6.15 x 6.15 meter-large ferroconcrete skeletons, seemingly light-weighted and with their structure clearly visible, added to by red-brick infill and ribbon-shaped glass fronts. Initially used solely in constructing industrial facilities, this technology was later also deployed for colleges, schools, hospitals, and the firm’s department store. The intensive building activity pursued by the corporation transformed Zlín into a modern, functional city in the 1920s. If initial development was determined in the first instance by economic premises, architectural Modernism was soon consciously integrated into the firm’s philosophy. But if today we wonder why Zlín is hardly mentioned in the relevant publications on Czech Modernism, this is primarily because the owner of the country’s largest corporation had appropriated the visions of leftwing architects and realized them, while many of the large-scale housing projects devised by the Czech avant-garde never left the drawing board. Quoting the architecture historian Jan Sedlák, the sociologist Annett Steinführer succinctly states: “The city was the gauntlet thrown down to the leftist avant-garde.” The rationalization and standardization of construction was to lead to a new culture of living. This concerned, on the one hand, dividing the basic functions of city into the sectors work, domestic living, and leisure time. On the other hand, the structural principles of industrial production were applied systematically in organizing and configuring space. In this context, technology was adjudged to possess an egalitarian power, which was to be then evident in the sameness of the spaces designed in compliance with its rules. Stripped of hierarchical attributes and objectified, space itself was geared towards an egalitarian society, which in its structure and organization was categorically distinct from its bourgeois counterpart. A host of leftist architecture and estate designs in Europe followed the concept of dissolving enclosed buildings, approaching them instead as a link in the production and assembly chain. Transferring the principles of industrial production to urban space was to lead to non-closure and open-endedness, as they were attributed to the modernization process in general. But already Bauhaus buildings, the estates of Bruno Taut, or the New Frankfurt development are not so clear as to their ideological orientation: “The new architecture,” writes Alexander Schwab, “was Janus-faced: it is both bourgeois and proletarian, capitalist and socialist. One could even say both: autocratic and democratic.” Tomáš Baťa’s Zlín is probably one of the most fascinating examples of the ambivalence at the heart of architectural Modernism: it stands in a tension-ridden constellation, between the reform movements pinning their hopes on technology and industry and the totalitarian technocratic fantasies which premised that the population was a block-like mass that due to its malleability could be formed as desired. The contradictions of Modernism are spatialized in Zlín.
“Zlín, the city in the garden” is the title of an advertising brochure put out by the city administration in 2005. With this slogan, the city is not only underlining the quality of the surrounding countryside. It wishes to highlight that several ideas of the European garden-city movement come to fruition in Zlín. The central idea of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city was to solve urban problems like overpopulation, air pollution, and deficient sanitary facilities by importing a rural way of life into the city. The corporate philosophy of Baťa displays several points of affinity to the garden-city concept: in 1925 the architect Gahura presented his project for an industrial area with the title “factory in green”. In his capacity as mayor, Baťa commented on the public presentation of these plans as follows: “A free citizen needs space to develop. We are therefore making our new apartment blocks generous and open on all sides. Therefore we want a garden city.” Connections to this reform concept are evident in the residential buildings for blue and white-collar workers in particular. The lone-standing red-brick cubes in green surrounds were an intentional contrast to the modern high-rise: this strategy followed the slogan, “work collectively, live individually.” But the garden city had a further dimension: Zlín’s boom in the 1920s was based on the influx of a population largely coming from rural areas. Zlín is comparable to recent urban developments in eastern Europe: the close connection between industrialization and urbanization spawned a population that had little in common with the urban industrial proletariat. The term “under-urbanization” (Iván Szelényi) was coined to describe new cities, responding to the fact that while urbanization took place, it was accompanied neither by a proportionate diversity of functions, nor urban qualities. Trade-union representation of their interests and the urbane experience of difference were also alien to most of the new Zlíners: an ideal breeding ground for the all-pervading impact of the Baťa system. The synchronization between city and corporation, borne by a spirit of community, which reached its apex with Tomáš Baťa’s election to the
post of mayor, could succeed only in a context of isolation from the large metropolises. In this respect, the heritage of the “city in the garden” has an anti-urbane dimension.
When today Zlín willingly evokes the image of the entrepreneur city, one could have the impression that Tomáš Baťa’s ideas have been revitalized. “The city of cooperative work” paraphrases a system fostering the responsibility and self-initiative of its employees. A “self-made man” with a career catapulting him from shoemaker without academic qualifications to the most successful industrial in Czechoslovakia, he tried to motivate his employees by allowing self-administration and active stake-holding. “I’ve come to work with you, not in my own interest but for the sake of your progress,” is the claim made in an address to the workers of factory no. 143 in December 1926. Given the higher wages, the social welfare schemes, and education programs for the employees, the critique of the exceptional workload in Zlín leveled by the left lost its credibility. When reading Baťa’s writings one gains the impression that models of flexible working practices and the “subjective modernization” of the working world, as practiced today in the context of post-Fordist corporate strategies, found an early application here: the ability of self-management and to contribute to teamwork as well as problem-solving competence are all qualities which have helped Baťa’s heirs in Zlín to become successful entrepreneurs in the neo-liberal climate of the Czech Republic, where initiative and willingness to take risks are rewarded.
When traveling to Zlín today, one traverses endless logistic areas and new commercial zones – the industrial city of Zlín is not only frayed along its edges, but new postindustrial typologies are penetrating into the old functional arrangements. Zlín was spatialized future – a modern place, a training ground for modern humans. Industrial modernization had resulted in clear-cut class relationships being dissolved, social distinctions becoming fluid, traditional structures being eroded. Zlín was a collection point for this social transformation. New behavior patterns were practiced here. New rules of movement, of maintaining distance, and of cooperation are inscribed into the city’s built layout: perceived as a potential threat, the masses congregating in the factory were canalized into estates resembling garden cities, while transitional zones like department stores and cinemas linked into various experiential worlds.
In an exemplary manner, Zlín followed the “regime of modern spatial patterns”; at the same time, these arrangements of space integrated a range of new possibilities and experiences – places of longing like the cinema were born, which point beyond the presently existing structure. In Zlín, much is already shaped as a spatial code that has determined the experiential world of the modern urban life down to the recent present. It is perhaps even conceivable that Tomáš Baťa’s industrial-feudal regime contrasted to the modern space he himself created. With its mobile entrepreneurs, the postindustrial urban landscape of Zlín today is a version continuing a spatial arrangement that was programmed early on to facilitate efficiency, mobility, and flexibility.
This text was first published in the magazine of Zipp in May 2008.
Regina Bittner
is a specialist in cultural studies and heads the International Bauhaus College of the Dessau Bauhaus Foundation. She is currently working on the ethnography of urban transformation processes in eastern Germany and eastern Europe and the urban culture of the postindustrial age. Bittner has also acted as curator of exhibitions on the cultural history of modernity and published numerous works and articles, most recently co-editing Transiträume, Berlin 2006. She is a member of the board for Zipp – German-Czech Cultural Projects.
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