Fuchs, Bohuslav and Jindřich Kumpošt; Zdeněk Rossmann, design.

[NATIONALISM AND INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING – MAPS AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION] Cesta k hospodářské obrodě ČSR [The road to Czechoslovakia's economic recovery].

Brno: self-published, 1935. Oblong quarto (21.5 × 30 cm). Original pictorial wrappers; 100, [1] pp. With fifty illustrations, mostly maps printed in blue, black, and red, a few reproductions from photographs. Additional graphs and charts throughout. Signed and inscribed by the author to Adolf Benš. Very good. Item #54527

A striking work of infrastructure cartography and visual communication by architect and urban planner Bohuslav Fuchs (1895–1972), with Zdeněk Rossmann's design throughout in red and black and the maps and plans printed mostly in blue and red. With Fuchs's dedicatory inscription to the functionalist architect Adolf Benš, dated 1951. This study by Fuchs and the architect Jindřich Kompošt was a response to the call to lift the country out of the 1930s economic crisis through a progressive system of transportation infrastructure. By the late 1920s, a modern internal transportation infrastructure for Czechoslovakia was being considered, with the aimr of increasing the role of automobile transportation which the existing network of roads no longer accommodated. The need for new long-distance roads (and a new form of road) was further compounded by the absence of roads connecting lands that had not been strongly historically linked: the very lands that made up the new country in 1918. Yet this grandiose project did not acquire its specific contours until 1935, when the first studies were drawn up by two independent teams of planners. The study of the first group, led by engineer Stanislav Bechyně, designed the Plzeň – Košice national road to take the shortest route, meaning through the middle of the country. The authors of the second plan, Brno architects Fuchs and Kumpošt, designed the trunk road from Cheb via Košice all the way to Chust in Carpathian Ruthenia. This would consist of two roads, a "northern" and "southern" route. The northern route was to provide a transportation route for key centers of heavy industry and would lead to Košice via Hradec Králové, Zlín and Levoča. The southern route was intended to help bring economic prosperity to regions with an inadequate network of roads and led around Plzeň, through Třebíč, Hodonín, Banská Bystrica and Rožňava. "Both plans were enthusiastically received by the Czechoslovak public, but state officials rejected them claiming that it would mean the use of an extremely high amount of public funds for something that was not all that urgent" (Bartlová, Building a State: The Representation of Czechoslovakia in Art, Architecture and Design, 2016).

One of 600 copies.

Rare; as of August 2024, KVK, OCLC show two copies outside the Czech Republic, one in the UK and one in North America.

Price: €3,500.00

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