The Bělidla suburb, stretching southwards from the historical centre, was originally an unimposing, densely built-up area with a central market square. The architect Otakar Novotný, a pupil of Jan Kotěra, was asked by the local Guild for Aesthetics to prepare a plan for improvements to the town in 1910. He recommended rebuilding the area along the lines of a Belgian “beguinage” – a square with a lawn in the centre, enclosed from all sides with low, modest homes and lined on all four sides with trees. Surrounding streets would lead into the square and thus, Bělidla would become the final part of the Masaryk “Administrative” quarter.
Novotný's idea never came into being and the Bělidla area, with its original layout, survived into the 1960s when most of it was demolished to make room for the main thoroughfare with crossroads and traffic lights, and a bus station.
At the end of the 1990s, the town council carried out the first steps in transforming this unappealing, yet highly exposed area with its oversized transport hub. The architect Michal Brix was approached with a request to carry out an urban design study. His design counted on reducing the size of the original bus station and placing it at the northwest tip of the area, parallel to Mařákova Street, with the remaining space used for a shopping centre, fashion and sports department store, market place, car salesroom, etc.
However, the rebuilding of the area was carried out according to an urban-design project by the town architect Zdeňka Vydrová in 2005. She placed the scaled-down bus station parallel to T. G. Masaryka Street so that the departures hall replaced the missing buildings along this street. She created an unusual semicircular car park in order to minimize the paved parking area in favour of the public recreational space in the form of a small park in the central segment with many intimate niches. Zdeněk Sendler was responsible for the landscaping of the park which contains mainly decorative plants and lacks expensive tree species as there are plans for another public building to be constructed in the area in the future.
The supermarket chain BILLA was interested in running the department store which the architect situated close to the pavement into the town centre and facing towards the road. The town council agreed, under the condition that the supermarket chain would have the building designed by renowned architects and that they would finance the building of the bus station departure hall. The investor approached the Brno design studio RAW (Tomáš Rusín, Ivan Wahla, Lukáš Vágner), which came up with a uniform design for the whole area. As the designers themselves say, “The relationship between the bus station building and the shop is expressed through their similar heights, the layout of the projecting concrete cornices and the uniform finish to the materials”, which consist of a combination of massive wood components and strips of brickwork. The new area is not “closed in on itself” but quite the reverse, interacting with its surroundings, as witnessed by the departures hall whose rear facade facing onto T. G. Masaryka street is divided into sections set back in relation to each other, designated for shops and services, thus enlivening this adjoining section of the grounds.