Vladimír Karfík

Vladimír Karfík was born in Idria, Slovenia, where his Czech father worked as a doctor.

In the years 1919–1924 he studied at and graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the Czech Technical University under Professors Josef Fanta and Antonín Engel. Among his fellow students were Karel Honzík, Josef Havlíček, Adolf Benš, Evžen Linhart, Vít Obrtel, Jaroslav Fragner, and Emil Belluš, who later became renowned architects.

During a study-stay in Paris he became acquainted with the works of the important architects Auguste Perret, André Lurcat, and Adolf Loos. Karfík gained practical experience in the studios of Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret.

Upon his return, he secured a three-year paid internship in the United States and greatly valued his experience working with the prominent American architect Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin.

Karfík’s work in the Zlín construction and planning office of the Baťa Company in 1930–1946 was an important stage in a long period of his career as an architect. In three years, he became head of the planning department of the Baťa construction division. He carried out a number of projects for the Baťa Company in Zlín, throughout Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, including schools, social and sports buildings, churches, airports, film studios, apartment buildings, and family houses. Particular mention should be made of the Baťa department stores and the administrative building No. 21 (The Skyscraper) in Zlín, one of the top works of interwar Czech architecture.

His plans for the Baťa Company are characterized by a mature technical and structural conception, linking functional relations, the attempt to achieve the most economical design, and the unity of the many technical and architectural details.

In 1993 he was given the Prize of the City of Zlín for his years of work in the design of industrial, public, and civil architecture in the town.

After being forced to quit the Baťa Company in 1946, he went to Bratislava where he worked in the Faculty of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the Slovak University of Technology as a university professor, influencing generations of architects (in the years 1955–1957, he was the dean of the faculty).

Apart from teaching, he continued to work as an architect as well. In the years 1978–1982 he taught at La Valletta at the University of Malta, and worked there in the 1980s also as a practicing architect.

The life and work of Vladimír Karfík span almost a century, yet he never submitted to any of the alternating ideologies or styles during that whole time. He designed and lectured not only in Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, but also in other countries of Europe.

For his varied and important architectural work and teaching he received a number of awards, and was the first Czech architect to be made, in 1985, an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. He was awarded honorary doctorates from the Technical Universities of Brno and Prague, and President Václav Havel conferred on him a gold medal for his contribution to Czech as well as international architecture.

 

Author: Ladislava Horňáková,curator of the architecture collection of the Regional Gallery of Fine Arts in Zlín