Tomas Bata Memorial is an architectural gem of a significant importance exceeding borders of the Czech Republic. It was created under unique historical circumstances, at times of the rapid growth of modern Zlin as a manufacturing-social-cultural and civilizational phenomenon. The Memorial crowned the urban structure of the city which had been being built up by Tomas Bata and F. L. Gahura since the first half of the 20^th century. The Memorial was designed to commemorate the incident so contradictory to dynamism of Zlin at that time; the sudden death of Tomas Bata in an airplane accident was a moment of standstill and became a strong emotion projected by František Gahura into the concept of this extraordinary building. It serves the purpose of a manifestation of the modern architecture and at the same time it is an elaboration of the compositional relations of the classical architecture.

The Memorial is an architectural gem – despite the fact its original exterior design is familiar to us mostly due to the photographs from that period; the reconstruction works which took place in 1950s defied all the principles that Gahura’s crystalline architecture stemmed from. The Memorial was appreciated not only on the European, but even on a global scale, as well as Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Villa Müller in Prague and some other significant sacral buildings. Both the message and meaning of the further existence of those buildings are apparent on the unique arrangement of their space that definitely deserves a spiritual purification and exposition.

 (An extract from an architectural research paper focused on the reconstruction of the Memorial by Petr Všetečka and his co-workers, 2014)