Gahurova Street

František Lýdie Gahura was a leading figure in Zlín architecture and urban planning in the first half of the 20th century, inextricably linked with "Baťa Zlín." Gahurova Street, named after him in 1991, is an essential part of the road leading from náměstí Práce to Zlín's largest housing estate Jižní Svahy. On the right bank of the river, it is joined by K Pasekám Street, rising against the flow of the Pasecký brook, and further to the east by Okružní Street, winding its way up the slope.

Historically, Gahurova Street consists of two main parts, namely the road passing between the factory and the castle park (part of náměstí Rudé armády /1945–1990/, later T.G. Masaryka street /1990–1991/), and the eastern part of Mladcovská Street (1934–1991). In terms of construction, it is one of the most complicated streets in Zlín and in terms of traffic, it is one of the busiest. In addition to individual transport, bus and tram lines run along this high-capacity four-lane road.

Gahurova Street connects left-half and right-half of Zlín. It crosses the Dřevnice River in the area of Čepkov via a reinforced concrete bridge opened on 1 October 1986, located a few metres down the river next to an older bridge from 1907, which was no longer sufficient for the volume of traffic. The bridge is part of a system of transport structures including an overpass of Vodní, Trávník and Benešovo/Havlíčkovo nábřeží Streets and the railway line, which required a comprehensive urban planning solution for the entire area (V. Mauer – statics, Jiří Bačík – transport, Pavel Šimeček – architecture and Kateřina Tuzarová – landscaping?).

The entire structure underwent a methodical renovation in 2015-2017. Among other things, it was cleared of small, low-quality construction and architecturally worthless buildings of a temporary nature used for commercial purposes, which were added to it on the east side of the bus station during the 1980s and 1990s.

With its character and parameters, Gahurova Street changes the spatial quality of its immediate surroundings (non-level crossings with older roads) and at the same time, on a symbolic level, "rewrites" several layers of Zlín's history. During the construction of the new bus station (1980–1983, station building 1987), the Zlín suburb of Trávník (also called Grygov), most likely founded in the 16th century, with a square, several streets and the church of St. Barbora, which was converted before 1820 into a granary, all disappeared. In connection with the construction of the railway station, the houses of the former square and the adjacent Nádražní Street were pulled down (1980–1981). The only reminder of the suburb remains the name of a street near the railway line.

The construction of a new high-capacity road significantly changed not only the street network in this part of town, but also the overall character of both areas in front of the bridge. The development of the suburb of Trávník consisted of small-town and rural houses; only in Nádražní Street were there multi-store buildings. On the right bank of Dřevnice, there was the suburb of Čepkov dating from the Middle Ages, which was followed in the 18th century by a scattered settlement of small farmers' houses. The small-town character of the Čepkov suburb was disrupted by the construction of a shopping centre, which is dominated today by a Kaufland store, with a large car park and access roads (2005). The demolition affected more than two dozen houses. Other commercial buildings adjoin Gahurova Street (Lidl at the intersection of Gahurova/Nábřežní, building originally built in 2003, replaced by a new store in 2016), but only occasionally have the older buildings been preserved. One of them is the Pod Lipou Inn (Gahurova 566).

Gahurova street is a core part of the transport system in the city centre, from the point of view of both individual and mass passenger transport. In addition to the immediate connection to the long-distance bus terminal, it also bridges the Zlín–Vizovice railway line, opened in 1899. During the feverish development of the Baťa company and the city of Zlín as a whole in the 1920s and 1930s, expansion of the inadequate railway station was repeatedly considered. At the end of the 1930s, a project was created to move the station to the Chmelnice area, i.e. east of the existing station. The generous station building was designed by Josef Gočár in the early 1940s. The torso of the unrealised plan is the single piece of dead end track between the straight track and Benešovo nábřeží.

In the south, the street begins in an area consisting of squares and green spaces, which gradually formed on the site of the garden, park and farm buildings adjacent to Zlín Castle and its courtyard from the 1920s and have been dynamically changing ever since. Today, Štefánikova and Tomáše Bati Streets connect to Gahurova here. Gahurova Street diverts traffic towards to the north, along the route that symbolically separates the old, "pre-Baťa" town centre from the "Baťa" city, whose heart was náměstí Práce, and at the same time connects this area with Tomáš Baťa's villa (František Novák, Jan Kotěra, 1911) on the right bank of Dřevnice at the foot of the Jižní svahy housing estate. It makes a large part of the axis between the Tomáš Baťa Monument and his villa. The street already appears in some of Gahura's projects from the time of WWII. Ironically, however, the form in which the street was realised in the 1980s, changed the character of the surroundings of Baťa's villa beyond all recognition, when it brought a completely different scale and destroyed its valuable garden (designed by František Thomayer).

 

 

ECH