The area of the town slaughterhouse was built by the town of Moravská Ostrava from the beginning of the 1880s, first by adapting and extending the inn near the cattle market. In 1890-1891, the abattoir received its first modern cold store, designed by the local builder Clemens Hladisch according to the project of the Brno engineering firm Brand & Lhuillier, and in 1893 a beef slaughterhouse building, which has not survived, was added.
In 1903, the complex was completed by the new building of the pork slaughterhouse, and especially its current high-rise dominating feature, the new cold store building with a machine room.
The leading domestic expert in this type of buildings, the Varnsdorf town builder Anton Möller (1864-1927), who had also designed slaughterhouses or cold stores in Varnsdorf, Česká Lípa, Jablonec nad Nisou, Terezín, Neugersdorf in Saxony, Tanvald and Kraslice, collaborated on their design in 1902 with the Prague Engineering Company, formerly Ruston & Co., which supplied the machinery. (...)
The construction was carried out by the Ostrava builder Ignaz Felix. The three-storey tower of the cold storey with evaporators and hot and cold water tanks has been listed since 1987, and in 1994 the listed building was extended to include the adjacent pig slaughterhouse from 1903 and the older cold store from 1892, but the wooden helmet of the tower was removed at the same time and has not been restored.
The extension of the abattoir towards Stodolní Street, no. 3204, with its classical façade on Slaughter Street, was also designed in 1925 by the specialist Berlin architect Walter Frese (1872-1949), who had designed abattoirs in Oldenburg, Bochum, Rostock and Zagreb.
In 1965, the original function of the premises was taken over by the meat processing plant in Martinov and was then used as garages and warehouses for the Technical and Garden Services of the City of Ostrava.
In 1995, it was acquired by Bauhaus, which built a typified wholesale store in its neighbourhood within a year.
In June 2016, the buildings were repossessed by the City of Ostrava, which in January 2017 announced an architectural competition for their conversion for the city's PLATO gallery. The competition, in which eight teams took part, was won by the Prague studio Petr Hájek Architects, with the Bratislava studio GutGut coming second, followed by Robert Konieczny from the KWK Promes studio in Katowice. And it was the Polish architect (due to a disagreement between the city and the winner of the competition on the contractual terms) who was entrusted with the project of converting the abattoir in 2018. The concept of the reconstruction is based on Konieczny's popular Moving architecture, where, thanks to the revolving segments, gates with the textures of the original but plastered walls, a truly democratic space open to anyone is created.
The newly renovated slaughterhouse, now surrounded by a garden designed in collaboration with permaculture designer Denisa Tomášková, opened to the public in May 2022 and was nominated as one of the seven finalists for the Mies van der Rohe Awards in 2024.
Porážková 3395/26, 70200 Ostrava - Moravská Ostrava, Czechia
