Bata Park (Möhlin)

Houses of the Bata Park

The Bata-Park (also called Bata-Areal) is a listed industrial site from the 1930s in Möhlin , Canton Aargau.

As in other places in the world, Tomáš Baťa , founder of the Baťa shoe company , planned and built a shoe production facility with an integrated residential village .

Emergence

In 1919/20, Tomáš Baťa and his half-brother Jan Antonín Baťa got to know Ford's River Rouge Plant in Detroit while on a trip to the USA . He took over the idea of Taylorism and applied it to his shoe factories located in the sales markets. His employees should work and live in the same area. Little by little, small villages with jobs, houses, schools and other social institutions emerged. This model of the Baťadorf or Baťapark was first implemented in the Czech Republic and Slovakia , then in the Netherlands , Great Britain , Canada , France and India, and finally in Möhlin.

On the way to the opening ceremony on July 12, 1932 in Möhlin, his plane crashed shortly after take-off. Tomáš Baťa was killed in the process. Up to 1990 shoes were produced in the Bata-Park in Möhlin, at times up to 700 employees worked for the Bata group in Möhlin. The area was sold in 2001 and other companies settled on the area.

The Bata area is listed in the Swiss inventory of cultural assets of national importance (KGS), 2009 edition.

Now a consortium wants to revitalize and renew the old facility, the mix of living and working is to be maintained.

Coordinates: 47 ° 34 '32.7 "  N , 7 ° 50' 35.8"  E ; CH1903:  630 446  /  two hundred and sixty-nine thousand five hundred twenty-eight

literature

• Tobias Ehrenbold: Bata, shoes for the world . Stories from Switzerland. Hier + Jetzt, Baden 2012, ISBN 978-3-03919-256-4 .
• Isabel Haupt. Bat'a is building: a company town near Möhlin. Art + Architecture in Switzerland No. 2, 2016. GSK , Bern, ISBN 978-3-03797-243-4

Web links

Commons : Bata Park  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Website of the municipality of Möhlin
• History of the Bata Group
• Press release fricktal.info from January 20, 2012 (PDF; 733 kB)
• Report in the NZZ from January 12, 2012 The Enchanted Park in Suburbia (PDF; 1.9 MB) on the website of the municipality of Möhlin.
• NZZ Online: NZZ from January 16, 2012, Janus face of modernity

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A-Objects AG 2018 . Swiss inventory of cultural assets of national importance. In: babs.admin.ch / kulturgueterschutz.ch. Federal Office for Civil Protection FOCP - Department of Cultural Property Protection, January 1, 2018, accessed on December 26, 2017 (PDF; 127 kB, 23 pages, updated annually, no changes for 2018).
2. ↑ Kaspar Surber: The cobbler and his satellites. In: WOZ The weekly newspaper 48/2012 of November 29, 2012