Baťa's skyscraper was also made famous by the director's mobile office

Prague – At the turn of 1938 and 1939, the management of the shoemaking company Baťa moved to a brand new building in Zlín. It was not an ordinary building, but at that time the second tallest building in Europe, which still attracts attention with its elegance and natural integration into the Baťa city. Today, among other things, it serves as the seat of the regional office; after an extensive reconstruction, Baťa's skyscraper with a unique movable office opened 20 years ago on October 30, 2004.

Building number 21 survived until the end of the 20th century without major interventions. In November 1944, it narrowly escaped damage during a bombing that destroyed part of Baťa's factory; after February 1948, its appearance only changed significantly with the addition of a showroom on the rooftop terrace in the late 1950s. The large reconstruction of the Zlín skyscraper did not come until the beginning of the 21st century, and the transformation from 2003 to 2004 cost nearly 630 million crowns. The sensitive renovation of the famous building even won an award in the Grand Prix of the Association of Architects competition.

The building by architect Vladimír Karfík, standing 77.5 meters tall, was constructed in just two years. It is reported that a team of 40 workers assembled the reinforced concrete skeleton with four cranes in 160 days. It's no wonder about the speed, as the Baťa module measuring 6.15 by 6.15 meters, which was already well-proven at the time, was used in the construction. The spaces between the columns were filled with bricks – in the case of the skyscraper, however, they did not form the building's outer shell, which was covered with ceramic cladding. Nevertheless, the building naturally fit in among the other factory buildings in the city.

The first of more than 2000 officials of the Baťa concern took their seats in the still under-construction building as early as May 1938, when the builders delivered the first three floors. They had access to the most modern technology of the time – from elevators to telephones and air conditioning. The concept of offices was ahead of its time; an entire floor consisted of one large room for approximately 200 employees. However, if necessary, the space could be divided into smaller rooms with pre-prepared standardized partitions made of steel, wood, and glass. The exception was the eighth floor, which housed the management, including the top boss.

Jan Antonín Baťa had one more special office that still piques the interest of both experts and the public. One of the columns of the "cells" that made up the skyscraper's structure did not have floors and thus actually formed a huge elevator shaft. Inside it was a cabin measuring six by six meters, in which the director had a fully equipped workplace. It included independent air conditioning, a telephone was a given, and the movable office also featured a sink with hot and cold water and drainage. This way, the head of the concern could visit his subordinates on other floors at any time.

The daily operation of Baťa's skyscraper would not have been possible without the technical facilities that occupied a significant part of the basement; some equipment was also on the roof. Underground, in addition to the archive, there was a machine room with an electrical distribution station and two telephone exchanges, an internal automatic one for 3500 phones and a manually operated one for long-distance calls. At the top, the architects also placed the air conditioning machine room and water tanks in addition to the terrace. Since it was not possible to open windows in the building, there was also a movable basket on the balcony from which cleaners could clean the outer shell of the skyscraper.

Although Karfík's building was the second tallest building in Europe at the time of its completion, surpassed only by the Palace of the General Banking Union in Antwerp, Belgium, at 87 meters, many things have changed in the seventy years since. Today, Zlín's "twenty-one" ranks deep down on the European scale and is not even among the tallest buildings in the Czech Republic. The title of the tallest building in the country is currently held by the Brno multifunctional building AZ Tower, which stands at 111 meters and was completed in 2013.