Zlín University has completed the construction of the educational complex designed by Jiřičná

Zlín - Tomáš Bata University in Zlín today opened a new educational complex that will serve the Faculty of Humanities, and the Faculty of Multimedia Communications will have exhibition space within it. Students will begin using the building from the summer semester, in February, said the bursar Alexander Černý to ČTK. The project cost over 500 million crowns. Construction of the building in the center of the regional city began two years ago, and its designer is architect Eva Jiřičná. The native of Zlín is also the author of the adjacent congress and university center.

The Faculty of Humanities did not have its own headquarters until now, despite being the largest faculty at the university, with about 2,200 students attending it.

The complex consists of two identical buildings with six above-ground floors, connected by a ground-level entrance building. It includes lecture halls, the largest of which has a capacity of 240 seats, classrooms including specialized language or computer classrooms. There are also facilities for teaching nursing or for future midwives. A student club will also operate there. In the basement, there are garages for 87 cars and operational-technical facilities. The construction cost 428 million crowns excluding VAT, of which 75 percent came from the state budget, with the remainder covered by the university.

Jiřičná noted at the building's opening today that she is very grateful for the opportunity to work in her hometown. "It is a rare coincidence that I, who moved away from Zlín at the age of five, am returning. Zlín stayed in my memory, it was the happiest feeling that I could come back," said the architect, who designed the building in yellow and bright colors. "The building is based on the idea that when you see the color of the sun and cheerful colors upon entering the building, depression must be pushed aside," Jiřičná said.

Many people criticized her first Zlín project, the congress and university center, for being overly modern and showing little respect for the functionalist architecture of Baťa. "But if Baťa were alive, heaven knows what the city would look like," Jiřičná said, emphasizing that it is not possible to live in a museum. "Surely some people will be unhappy that a building of bricks and concrete was not built here, but on the other hand, the city deserves something contemporary and the memory of Baťa and Baťa's architecture can be found if one looks," Jiřičná noted.

According to the university rector Petr Sáha, no other similar large building is planned in the near future. Projects worth over a billion crowns are prepared, but they relate to the renovation of existing buildings and the construction of laboratories. "This is the infrastructure that is sufficient for 10,000 students," Sáha told ČTK. Tomáš Bata University in Zlín was established in 2001.