Urban Furniture

In the 1990s, foreign advertising agencies began to enter/penetrate Czech cities with the aim of obtaining space for large-scale advertising in exchange for the provision of bus stop furniture or kiosks. In 1992, the department of the chief architect, led by Karel Havliš, initiated a public competition to design furniture elements for the city of Zlín. The announced competition was subsequently organised by the Zlín Transport Company in cooperation with the Design Centre of the Czech Republic in Brno. The goal of the competition was to obtain a design and subsequent production documentation for individual furniture elements that would be "in harmony with the architecture of the city." 

The brief of the two-phase competition was to design a bus stop shelter including traffic information notice boards, benches, a waste bin, and a vending machine. The proposal could be expanded to include a sales stand that interested parties could rent. Another task was the creation of a city information system (e.g., signposts, information boards). Additional elements were bike racks and flat or cylindrical surfaces for advertising. A total of 13 proposals were submitted, with the final selection being made by an expert jury, which included Karel Kobosil, director of the Design Centre of the Czech Republic, Pavel Škarka, a teacher at the Academy of Arts and Architecture in Prague, architects Jiří Gebrian, Karel Havliš, and Boris Hála. Other members of the jury were engineers Vladimír Daťka, Ivan Matulík, Antonín Macháček, and Libor Dvořáček. 

The students of the detached design studio of the University of Applied Arts in Prague won the most awards (3rd place Mario Paravan, 2nd place Bohuslav Stránský, while Ivo Pecháček and David Zezula were also awarded). Designer duo David Karásek and Radek Hegmon became the winner of the competition and subsequently implemented the furniture. In their design, they used the recommended modular system and worked with two basic types of support for the bus stop shelters and sales stands. The roof was made up of a system of subtle segments held by steel beams. Individual elements could be combined into larger or smaller assemblies, and the back wall was filled with safety glass. The distinctively-shaped structures with exposed load-bearing elements referred to the popular high-tech style of the time based on foreign models. Thanks to the use of transparent materials, the furniture met the condition of not competing with the surrounding architecture.

The actual plans for implementation were completed after the end of the competition. The designers became members of the working group for the urban parterre (other members and artistic and organisational guarantors were representatives of the department of the chief architect: Karel Havliš and Jana Koldová. The technical solution was consulted by the transport department: V. Sandtnerová and I. Matulík). Designs and other studies were paid for from the city budget through the Department of Urban Planning and Architecture. In addition to the stops, the furniture was expanded to include display areas, sign boards, rubbish bins and benches. The first implementation of bus stop shelter prototypes took place in 1994 near the castle park. Thanks to these prototypes, technical and artistic shortcomings were resolved. By the end of the year, the Družstevní stop at Jižní Svahy and the Kúty stop followed. 

The resulting form of the urban furniture was simplified compared to the first designs so that the system offered the most universal options for variations. Steel columns (types A and B) supported suspended roofs made of basic geometric shapes - circle, square, triangle – made out of cellular polycarbonate. The smallest unit covered an area of ​​2.45 × 2.45 metres, and by placing them next to each other, stops of different sizes were created according to the needs of the location. There were also screens carried by steel supports, which were filled with safety glass for advertising boards.

In 1995, David Karásek and Radek Hegmon founded the company Cité (subsequently renamed mmcité), which designed and soon also realised and supplied urban furniture. Since its inception, the comprehensively conceived system has won numerous awards (for example, the 1994 Good Design award). The company gradually grew and based its headquarters in nearby Bílovice, where a new complex consisting of administrative and production buildings designed by architects Kamil Mrva and Luďek Del Maschio was built on the premises of ​​the former agriculture cooperative.

Post-revolutionary Zlín can boast only a small number of significant buildings. It came to the fore thanks to the activities of the Chief Architect's Office under the leadership of architect Karel Havliš, who promoted the programmatic solution and the implementation of uniform urban furniture. From these activities, the first visual identity of the city, prepared by designers Petr Babák and Tomáš Machek, began to emerge. The result was a unique graphic standard that is still used today. 

The mmcité company gradually grew and became one of the largest suppliers of urban furniture in the Czech Republic; it also has branches abroad. From 2021, the authors of the first urban furniture from Zlín began to operate under two brands. David Karásek heads the mmcité company and continues to focus primarily on urban furniture. Radek Hegmon's egoé brand includes several product areas focused on equipping public and private outdoor spaces, including traffic structures and noise barriers.

The original bus stop shelters and elements of urban furniture are still in use today in Zlín, albeit many of them in poor technical condition. In the future, it is hoped that at least part of the shelters will be renovated so that they continue to serve as a reminder of an important stage in the development of urban furniture in the public space of Zlín, in much the same way that a similarly unique period artefact, the tram stop shelter in Brno on Údolní Street, which was designed in 1928 according to the design of the architect Oskar Poříska, has been successfully renovated.