Publication details
Designing national pavilions and nations: Czechoslovakia and Bat'a at interwar exhibitions
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Monograph |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Not everyone shared the image of success promoted by national pavilions at world’s fairs. The Czechoslovak participation in the interwar period was always a result of extensive negotiations between different interest groups of the various ministries, industrial representatives or designers. The Czechoslovak pavilion at the 1937 exposition in Paris, for example, was highly praised and awarded multiple prizes, yet in Czechoslovakia it received harsh criticism. The Czech industrialist and owner of the global shoe manufactory, Jan Antonín Baťa, called it a ‘magnificent failure’ as the pavilion did not give proper justice to business and fell for cheap, artistic avant-gardisms. Frustrated by the failures of the state in promoting the nation and its companies, Baťa offered a solution for a better Czechoslovak pavilion for New York’s World of Tomorrow in 1939. A combination of commerce and entertainment, the pavilion reflected the industrialist’s understanding of the relation between a successful company, the state and the world’s fair. Baťa ran much more than shoe production, he built a town where the company’s first factory was founded and he also owned a vision of the future of his workers and the entire state. As a company, Baťa also put up their own pavilions at world’s fairs in Brussels and Paris presented not only their products, but also a happy community of workers whose work life, past time, education and health were well looked after. By the late 1930s, Baťa built factories, towns and culture of living, not dissimilar to those of Ford, Pullmann and similar giants. They also shared an interest in using the world’s fair as a useful tool for displaying and promoting the company worldview. This text explores previously neglected questions about the links between entrepreneurialism and statehood on the one hand and eugenic visions of progress on the other and claims that these came to visual prominence at world's fairs especially in the times of radicalised nationalism of the 1930s. |
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