Holešov native prof. Ing. arch. Jiří Voženílek graduated first from a real grammar school in Prague and then from the College of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the Czech Technical University (1928-1933). While still at university, the left-leaning Voženílek and his like-minded colleagues founded the Progressive Architectural Group - PAS (1932), which was a platform for professional discussions and publications on modern urbanism, often influenced by Soviet urban planning.

In 1935, together with his PAS colleagues, he participated in the international housing competition of the Bata, a. s., Zlín concern, in which he won the second prize for an unrealised project. After finishing his practice in the architectural office of František Roith, he joined the development department of the Bata company in Zlín in 1937. During the war he was mainly engaged in urban planning and planning of concern towns and experimented with the typology of the company house (1942 ground floor variant of a single house made of mobile panels). With the change in social and political conditions, he became a key figure in the post-war development of industrial Zlín (head of the design department of the nationalised Bat'a company and chairman of the construction committee of the Municipal Council). From 1946 he headed the working group of the new regulatory plan of the city of Zlín. His culminating project was the Collective House of 1947-1951, together with the Litvínov Koldom the only Czech realisation of avant-garde left-wing thinking about collective housing.

Unlike the concern factory towns in Otrokovice and Třebíč, and especially in Šimonovany-Baťa and Martfü in Hungary, which were realisations of Voženílek's regulatory plans, Voženílek observed the situation in the Baťa town of Zruč rather from a distance. In 1940, he did sign the amendment of R. H. Podzemný's regulation plan for Zruč and the restructuring of the concept of the square and the central road with the shopping area, but his main legacy in Zruč was to defend the whole concept of the factory town from the occupation authorities and their building supervision. Together with the directors Miesbach and Vavrečka and the head of the Zlín concern's design office Karfík, he was a participant in a meeting with the Cologne Oberlandrat Eckholdt, during which he defended the very existence and urban-architectural design of Bata's own Zruč before the building councillor Frank from the Reich Protector's Office.

In 1949, Voženílek moved to Prague, where he headed the state institutes and offices in the field of urban planning and architecture - Stavoprojekt (1949-1951) and the Research Institute of Architectural Development (1952-1955). From 1961, he served as chief architect of the City of Prague and professor of the Department of Urban Planning at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University. As he grew older, he fell into the background during normalisation. He died in Prague in the mid-1980s.