A purpose-built store for Tomas Bat'a (1876-1932), the famous founder of the shoe empire. Bat'a's fully automated manufacture was based in the town of Zlin in Moravia. He encouraged an avant-garde approach both to shoe manufacture and architecture, producing, displaying and selling his goods as well as housing his employees in the most up-to-date buildings. By the early 1930s, Bat'a owned 45 buildings and had 16,000 employees producing 150,000 pairs of shoes a day! The department store was designed for the sole purpose of selling Bat'a footware. Each storey was linked by lifts and side staircases and had minimum corridors in the sales areas. The main staircase has now been replaced by escalators. The structure is a reinforced concrete frame, whose columns are filled with cast iron and have the smallest possible cross section, identical in each storey. The front and back elevations are almost alike and fully clad in glass. Between the continuous bands of windows thin floor slab zones are covered with translucent white glass, which were used for advertising. The same glass also frames the facade vertically on each side.