EN
The text deals with the work by Josef Šuta (1863–1941), a project architect and building company owner, who designed more than 160 houses and 60 farm and technical buildings in the Uherský Ostroh area (south-eastern Moravia) from the late 19th century until the 1930s. Although only several buildings have survived to date, archival sources adequately present the supra-regional importance of this builder. While his layouts respected the operation of farmsteads and craftsmen’s homesteads, he used ArtNouveau elements to adorn the facades of those buildings already at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In her study, the author summarizes, in terms of quality and quantity, Šuta’s building activity, which lasted more than fifty years, completing this with the emic perspective of current owners, and searching for their relationship to the building heritage. The field research, lasting for several years, in combination with heuristic investigation in archives and with interviews with respondents confirmed the great inertia of folk culture’s phenomena in everyday culture as well as the readiness to accept and fund aesthetic elements which seem to be superfluous from the perspective of functionality. In the conclusion, the author of the study states that the uniqueness of the location’s building image is a very brittle value: it is not only historic buildings but also associated archives and photo-documents that are irretrievably disappearing.