Mitop / The textile production demise phenomenon

In 1890, the Austrian Felt Mills Joint Stock Company was co-founded by B. Engel & Co., Adolf Löw & Son and Seidl & Jellinek. Its production was concentrated in the former Adolf Löw & son factory on Zábrdovická Street. From 1900 onwards, the company continued its operations under the name of United Felt Factories Inc., headquartered in the German town of Giegen an der Brenz.

The Brno factory, which burned down in 1911, got generously rebuilt, according to a design by the German architect Phillip J. Manz. The reinforced concrete building with brick linings and large factory windows still stands to this day, facing the former Premonstratensian monastery (today’s Brno Military Hospital), to which it forms an interesting visual counterpart. An elevated tower, topped with a Biedermeier helmet-shaped roof, originally housing a water tank (most Brno’s textile factories had their own water towers) is considered its dominant accent. Behind this new building, giving a very airy impression thanks to its large windows, operational buildings along the Svitava River were located.

The company’s production scope was very broad, including technical felts, clothing and lining felts or engine and locomotive boiler covers. Final products were only exported to European countries at first, expanding to North and South America and Asia in the second half of the 20th century. After World War II, the company got confiscated by a presidential decree and so-called national administration was introduced.

In 1948 the company was incorporated into the national enterprise Mitop, a united felt factory based in Mimoň. Despite building a new dyeing and finishing plant between 1952 and 1955, up until the 1980s the production was still carried out on the original 1913 machines. After 1989, the national enterprise Mitop was privatized, thus giving birth to the company Panatex. Today, the former factory premises have undergone a complete renovation and are rented out. This renovation, being one of the more fortunate ones, allowed the building to retain its original character with only a certain amount of modernizing elements and stands as an example of a factory building converted for today’s needs outstandingly well.