Vladimír Kubečka

Vladimír Kubečka

architect, urban planner
(18 September 1913 Ostrava - 17 March 1977 Zlín)

The Ostrava-born Vladimír Kubečka first graduated from the Vocational School for Woodworking in Valašské Meziříčí under Professor Josef Místecký and then in 1936 from the School of Applied Arts in Prague (Professor Pavel Janák). In the same year he became an employee of the Zlín-based Bat'a company, whose building and architectural traditions he continued to develop after 1945. After the war, as a member of the working group for the regulatory plan of Zlín (František Lýdie Gahura, Vladimír Karfík, Jiří Voženílek), he participated in the elaboration of the guideline zoning plan for the industrial estate Zlín - Malenovice - Otrokovice (1946-1948, co-author J. Voženílek) and the study of the development of the eastern part of Zlín (1947). He was involved in urban planning in the design of the construction of three-storey residential buildings in the Obeciny district (Julius Fučík's district) as part of the first two-year plan (1946). The author of the architectural design was Vladimír Karfík. Another group of three-storey houses of the same type was realized by Karfík and Kubečka in 1948-1949 in the Zálešná district. Together with Karfík they designed the building of the District National Committee in Gottwaldov in 1950. The regulatory plan of Třebíč-Borovina from August 1946 is also signed with Kubeček's name.

Kubeček's Zlín architectural monument was the central shoe warehouse No. 34 (1947-1955), the first Czechoslovak attempt at modern warehousing technology with a sophisticated internal transport organisation and a system of wagoning finished products. Also in Otrokovice-Batau he designed a unique building of a tannery with interesting structural elements, designed and realized in cooperation with Professor Konrád Hruban (1948). The two-nave hall was roofed with separate shells in the shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid, between which prefabricated skylights were inserted. For the first time in the history of Czechoslovak construction, the steaming of thin-walled reinforced concrete shells was used directly on the construction site, which accelerated the maturing of the concrete. Similar construction technology was subsequently introduced by other companies.

After 1948, Kubečka became the director of Projection Plants of Light Industry, n.p. Gottwaldov (later Centroprojekt), and worked in this position until 1970, when he had to leave it for political reasons as a result of the post-war personnel purges. At the time of the founding of the factory town Zruč nad Sázavou - Bat'ov, Kubečka had already been an employee of the construction department of the Bat'a Concern, a. s., Zlín, headed by František Lýdia Gahura and Vladimír Karfík for several years. In the Bata part of Zruč, alongside Miroslav Drofa, he participated in the project of a three-storey women's liberty house (1939-1941), basically identical to the liberty houses in Zlín and in the Hungarian concern town of Martfü.

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Doc. PhDr. Martin Jemelka, Ph.D.

Doc. PhDr. Martin Jemelka, Ph.D. (1979) is a Czech historian and music publicist specializing in social, economic and religious history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of workers, housing and everyday life, historical demography, cultural history and the history of the Bata concern. He studied at the University of Ostrava and worked at foreign universities in Jena and Vienna. He is the author and co-author of more than a dozen monographs and numerous studies, chapters and articles in domestic and foreign publications and periodicals. He is the recipient of the Josef Pekar Prize (2009), the Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for Outstanding Achievements in Research, Experimental Development and Innovation (2018), the Egon Erwin Kisch International Prize for Non-Fiction (2021), and the President's Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic for the Promotion or Popularization of Research, Experimental Development and Innovation (2023). He is systematically involved in the popularisation of science and cooperates with public media, for example as an expert advisor for the two-part TV film Dukla 61 (2018) or the TV documentary series Industrie ( 2021).

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