Congress Centre, Zlín

Zlín was built almost from nothing in the 1920s and 1930s as the company town of the Baťa shoe works, on a strict grid of red brick and reinforced concrete frames. Eva Jiřičná was born there in 1939 and left as a small child; the congress and university centre is her return, seventy years later, to the town her practice partners still call the model. The hall sits in a plain concrete drum, wrapped by a foyer whose outer wall is glass block held in a steel cage, so that the building glows rather than displays itself after dark. Over it sits a steel roof sixty metres across and about ninety tonnes in weight, spanning the auditorium in one piece; she described its structure as taken from the silica shell of a diatom. The university centre alongside was finished in 2008 and the two opened together in 2010.