A native of Slovenia, Vladimír Karfík graduated in architecture and civil engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague. He started as an elévév of the design office of the legendary American builder and architect Frank Lloyd Wrigth (1867-1959), probably the most influential North American architect of the 20th century. From 1930 to 1946 he was first a member and then head of the design department of the Bata Group's construction office. Together with Jan Antonín Bata and thirty-four other experts, he contributed to the internal company manual, The Industrial City ( 1938), which codified the principles of Bata design and construction. In 1946, Bata was forced to leave the national enterprise. He found new employment at the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering of the Slovak Technical University in Bratislava and subsequently at the University of La Valletta in Malta (1978-1982).

A number of iconic projects of Bata's corporate construction are associated with the name of Vladimír Karfík. In Zlín, he was involved in the completion of the Community House (1933) and the design and implementation of the Commercial and Community House in the Díly district of Zlín (1937), the Czech Brethren Evangelical Church congregation (1937) and the administrative building no. He designed a social house (1936) and an unrealised design for a church-memorial (realised in Šimonovany-Baťa, Slovakia) for the factory town of Otrokovice-Baťa. His realisations could also be found beyond the Czech borders, whether in Slovakia, or in Borov, Croatia, or Amsterdam, the Netherlands (the Bata company's department store on the busy Kalverstraat). In Zlín, he also designed after 1945 (the building of the regional national committee, residential buildings in Na Obecinách and Zálešné).

Karfík is also the author of a valuable memoir in which he describes the reality and figures of Bata's Zlín in a factual, critical and insightful manner. With Tomáš Baťa, he shared his enthusiasm for high-rise buildings (Karfík's eight-storey "skyscraper" in Brno, the ten-storey department store in Zlín, the eleven-storey social house there and the sixteen-storey Baťa skyscraper in Zlín in 1938), However, he was critical of Bata's indiscriminate vocabulary, his authoritarian management style, the hectic work pace and the extreme workload of Bata's employees.

Vladimír Karfík made his mark on the history of the Bata Concern's factory town Zruč nad Sázavou - Bat'ov in several ways. First of all, together with Bata directors Miesbach and Vavrečka, he participated in the decisive meeting with the Protectorate authorities on 13 March 1941, which decided the future of Bata's Zruč. Architecturally, Karfík's name appears both in the construction documentation of the wartime housing development (single and double houses Zruč, the social house) and in the plans of the post-war housing development inspired by Karfík's apartment houses in the Fučíkova quarter of Zlín (1947).