Prof. Dr. Ing. Emanuel Hruška, DrSc., was born into a Czech-German family in Prague. He graduated from a real grammar school in Vinohrady and subsequently studied first at the College of Architecture and Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University (1924-1928) and then at the Academy of Fine Arts under the architect Josef Gočár. Architecture and urbanism became Hruška's worldview, so during his studies he was already involved in the Club for Old Prague, the Masaryk Academy of Labour (MAP), the editorial office of the professional magazine Stavba (Construction) and from 1931 as a scientific secretary at the Institute for Urban Construction at MAP. Since the 1930s he was an active participant in architectural and urban planning competitions alongside leading Czechoslovak architects and urban planners.

In 1934 he received his doctorate from the Czech Technical University and in 1938 he was habilitated there in the field of urban planning. In 1935-1936 he was entrusted with the post of secretary general of the International Housing Congress, served as head of the study department of the Electricity Companies of the City of Prague and finally, before the war, took the post of chief building advisor to the Prague City Council. In 1938-1945 he was a member of the planning commission of the State Regulatory Commission of Prague. At the same time, he was an expert on urban planning at the headquarters of the Bata Concern, a. s., Zlín. After the war, he worked simultaneously as an associate professor of the Department of Urbanism at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Brno University of Technology and head of the planning department of the Provincial Study and Planning Institute in Brno.

In 1948, he began working in Bratislava as head of the Institute of Urban Construction at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering of the Slovak Technical University (full professor since 1953, DrSc. 1955), where he served as dean for two years. In 1956-1961 he worked as an external head of the Department of Economic Geography of the Institute of Economics of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. In 1958 he was appointed first deputy chairman of the Central Commission for State Heritage Protection at the Ministry of Culture of the Czechoslovak Republic, and from 1962 he was its chairman. After the war, Hruška devoted himself to the theory and methodology of spatial planning, current problems of economic reconstruction of post-war Czechoslovakia and teaching rather than architectural and urban planning competitions.

By the 1960s at the latest, he began to be regarded as one of the most prominent representatives of Czechoslovak urbanism and spatial planning, which he devoted himself to especially in Slovakia(Project of Urbanisation of the Slovak Socialist Republic 1967, Development of Central Slovakia, etc.). Since the 1960s, he has increasingly dealt with the rehabilitation, reconstruction and revitalisation of the historic cores of Slovak cities, with Bratislava at the forefront. In the following decade, he systematically devoted himself to organizational and administrative duties and popularization of foreign trends, especially in monument care. In the last decade of his life he returned to his native Prague to head the Club for Old Prague.

Hruška came into contact with the Bata concern in the mid-1930s. In 1937, together with Richard Podzemný and Jiří Voženílek, he participated in the project of the Ideal Industrial City of the Future Zlín and the following year in the design of the Square of Work together with Bohuslav Fuchs. In the 1940s, he turned his attention to Bata's satellites, factory towns in pre-war Czechoslovakia (1942-1943 plans for the completion of a factory estate in Sezimovo Ústí) and abroad (1943 urban design for the unrealised factory town of Seneffe in Belgium). In 1944-1948, Hruška drew up a series of regulatory plans for Bat'a in zruč, according to which two dormitories and three residential buildings were built in 1946-1948.

Although Hruška's design was based on a thorough analysis of the micro-region and the existing buildings, he apparently designed under the supervision of the occupation authorities, according to whose instructions he had to rework the original designs of the buildings on Peace Square. He designed bachelor's quarters in the places of the unrealised residential buildings. He expanded the residential capacity of Bata Zruč to 12,000 people and extended its development to the top of the hill above the town. Several variants of Hruška's regulatory plan included a number of public buildings, a hospital, schools, cultural facilities and a stadium. The altered infrastructure catered to the growing demands of the automobile. Above all, however, Hruska's concept no longer multiplied the formula of the ideal industrial city, but respected the local conditions in the difficult Protectorate times.

According to Hruška's 1944 model, exhibited in 1949 on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the founding of Bata's Zruč nad Sázavou, a cultural house with a biograph, a department store with a spa in the basement in the lower part of the square and a park with a (Bata?) monument in the upper part of the square were designed opposite the Social House. Although no building was constructed according to this model by Hruška, the concessions to the Reich-German and Protectorate urban planners (hipped roofs, ground floor passages, plastered masonry with chevrons around the windows) are stylistically reminiscent of the finished facade of the Social House. Even Hruška's post-war regulation plan was not fully respected, let alone implemented. Residential houses were built on the site of the projected dormitories around 1960, and soon afterwards apartment buildings began to be built in Zruč, first brick, later prefabricated, not conforming to any of the original regulatory plans.