Trade Fair Centre, not far from the high-rise administrative building was built at the request of the Ministry of Foreign Trade. It wanted a representative building that would serve ministry officials and foreign delegations. There were originally plans for accommodation on the third floor, but these were shelved in later designs and the eventual building was purely administrative. The authors of the design were the former chief architect of Brno Exhibition Centre Zdeněk Müller, Petr Burian and Věra Borková, and the final project was elaborated by the staff of Stavoprojekt Brno. The design of the interior was done by Zdeněk Müller in collaboration with Josef Macholán.
The building was located on the site of a former restaurant at the edge of a lake behind the City of Brno and Moravia pavilions. The lake was the result of sandy gravel quarrying for the construction of the interwar Palace of Industry and Trade (now Pavilion A) and the high groundwater level in the exhibition grounds, which are located on a floodplain of the Svratka river. The former restaurant was on the south-eastern edge of the lake and had an open terrace. It was built to a design by Vladimír Škára for visitors attending the opening of the Exhibition of Contemporary Culture in Czechoslovakia in 1928. It was most likely there until 1957, when it was demolished to make way for the adjacent administrative building. In 1954, a summer amphitheatre was built on one of the shorter banks of the lake to a design by František Kalivoda, but this has also disappeared. In 1979, there was a project for a garden by the architect Květoslav Vlček, which included landscaping and the dividing up of areas around the lake, and the construction of a pier.
The trapezoidal formations of the lake and pier communicate with the architectural morphology of the Trade Fair Centre, which was built shortly after, between 1983 and 1985. However, only the first part of the original design materialized. Given the fact that, unusually, the initiative for the construction came from outside Brno Exhibition Centre, i.e., from the Ministry of Foreign Trade, there may have been political subtext. The three-storey building is significantly horizontally segmented, with receding terraces around the whole of the north-western front facade. The principal material and also aesthetic element was fair-face concrete with a cast-in-form effect. The ground floor exposes monumental pillars that raise the second floor above the lake, in which the long rows of windows are reflected. The office space was located on the upper two floors, because there was an existing walkway preserved within this newer building that connected the administrative building and Pavilion D. Moreover, it was necessary to deal with the problem of groundwater in the foundations, the differing height of the terrain with regard to the lake and the exhibition grounds, and the nearby road. The rear part of the building is starker and serves as an entrance, while the front part, with its terraces, merges into a peaceful oasis of greenery.
Today, the building houses Brno Exhibition Centre (BVV) headquarters. This change in function was accompanied by a renovation of the original interior and a modification to the floor plan by Jaromír Stříbrný in 1999. Nevertheless, overall, the original form of the building has been preserved without significant construction work.
MK
