Join us for the Architectural History & Theory Seminar Series for 2023/24.
This event is taking place both in person and online. Please confirm how you wish to attend when reserving your ticket on Eventbrite. Instructions will be sent on how to find the venue and how to join online via email.
Speaker bio:
Vendula Hnídková is an architectural historian, curator, and lecturer. She focuses on modern and contemporary architectural production in Central Europe as framed by questions of transnationalism, identity, and propaganda. Currently, she is a research fellow at the Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Between 2018 and 2020, she was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham.
Abstract:
This lecture considers the development of the industrial town of Zlín, in former Czechoslovakia. Zlín counts among the most spectacular modern towns in Central Europe. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Baťa shoe company transformed the remote settlement into a model factory town that was swiftly replicated on a global scale. Modern architecture and urban planning formed an essential means to introduce modernity to this once-backward area. Forced to achieve total efficiency, the Baťa planners designed premises ranging from a sky-scraper to schools, from a hospital to housing, and a labour camp to involve every workforce available.
Image: Interwar Zlin.
Book Zoom online at Eventbrite.
Venue: Elliot Room (2.403), Minto House, 20 Chambers Street.