The book Ostrava Industrial and Modern is a guide to architecture

Ostrava - More than 400 photographs and 170 entries are included in the publication Ostrava Industrial and Modern, which has recently been published by Paseka publishing house. The book is a guide to the city's architecture from 1845 to 1949. The texts are authored by monument preservationist Martin Strakoš, and the photographs are by Martin Štěrba and Josef Horázný from ČTK.

The publication illustrates the development of Ostrava, which became an industrial center in the 19th century. A decisive impulse for the region's development was the railway connection with Moravia and Vienna in the middle of the century. "Architecture is a direct witness to this happening. It shows the transformation from small-town scale to metropolitan, the rational approach of a thriving metropolis to urbanism, the unprecedented expansion of industrial architecture, the formative influence of the corporate aesthetics of the Rothschilds' Vítkovice Ironworks on the shape of the city, and the interwar transformation of Ostrava into the administrative center of the region," states the publisher.

All three authors of the book are natives of the Ostrava region. Strakoš works at the National Heritage Institute in Ostrava. He focuses on the issues of 19th and 20th-century architecture and has published his insights on Ostrava's architecture in several books.

Štěrba is the deputy editor-in-chief of ČTK's Multimedia Database. He has participated in numerous joint exhibitions in the Czech Republic and abroad, exhibiting individually in the Czech Republic, and his creative work focuses on subjective documentation. Horázný has also had solo and joint exhibitions, focusing particularly on subjective documentary photography and various forms of applied photography, and he professionally engages in enlarging black-and-white photographs.