Infopoint of Baťa housing

The single-family house with a veranda was created as part of a special residential district Nad Ovčírnou, which in the second half of the 1920s grew up on an empty sloping area south of the newly built shopping and social centre, that has become of náměstí Práce. Baťa has defined the accommodation of its employees here in several ways. It reserved the zone of detached houses set in greenery only for married employees with families who held high profile jobs in the company - department heads, researchers and the like. The company offered them the full comfort of a small-scale residential area located within walking distance of the factory. The houses were built for one family, and were relatively spacious.

The single-family house, which now houses the Infopoint of the Baťa housing, was built in 1927–1928 as a house with a basement, a veranda, living room, a kitchen and a smaller room on the ground floor. A wooden staircase in the middle of the building led to the first floor, where there was a children's room, the parents' bedroom, another smaller room and a bathroom. The layout of the single-family house deviates from other houses, the location of the bathroom on the first floor displays the attempt to verify a new type of house. A number of surrounding houses on Nad Ovčírnou II Street gave way to dormitory buildings for students of the Baťa School of Work in the early 1930s. However, the single-family house No. 1295 remained and stands alone in the immediate vicinity of one of the dormitories. In 1944 plans for the adaptation of the house were made, which expanded the kitchen area with the adjoining room and made the veranda a relaxing terrace accessible directly from the staircase. In later years, further modifications took place: walling the door from the porch to the main room, blinding the windows to the south and moving the main door, originally facing the boarding house, to the west.

In recent history, the municipality-owned detached house has been used as a public exhibition of Baťa housing. It took on a new use in 2014, when the Zlín architectural office ellement architects, moved in. They have focused on the issue of Baťa housing for a long time, examining the possibilities of its modifications to suit current needs as well as trying to acquaint the public with the Baťa architecture through guided tours of the city. In 2017 the ground floor of the house was adapted to house a permanent exhibition The Baťa Home: Zlín's Vanishing Architectural Elements. It was completed as part of the long-term NAKI research project focused on the transformation of industrial cities in the 20th century, which took place in cooperation with the Faculty of Social Studies MU in Brno and the National Technical Museum in Prague.

 

The exhibition, together with the accompanying catalogue of the same name, is intended to help visitors to Zlín understand how the accommodation policy of the Baťa shoe concern worked in the interwar period. The exhibition describes how the company organised the housing and lifestyle of its employees, shows the architecture and technology of construction of workers' houses and displays how, with the help of standardisation and typification, a strictly controlled and planned process of their implementation took place. Attention is also paid to fixed administrative procedures for allocating rental houses, rules for their use and control mechanisms utilised by the accommodation department. In addition to the specific experience of being in the environment of the original Baťa house, the exhibition allows the visitor to study commonly hard-to-find archival materials - construction statistics prepared by the company for each new building with data on materials, prices and layouts, questionnaires and housing applications, recommendations of known employees and forms evaluating tenants and the way they live in the property. In the area of ​​the Baťa Housing Infopoint, the diversity of individual types of accommodation, their specifics and period variations are also clearly presented. Libor Stavjaník's series of original photographs and authentic elements in the exhibition make it possible to get acquainted with the original details of wooden windows, railings, doors, which have almost disappeared from the residential colonies as a result of modern interventions.

 

 

KE