Military barracks belong to the specific type of architecture, which had been built during the19th and the first half of 20th century in the area of recent Slovakia in extremely high intensity.Their location in the urban structure of the city has similar characteristics together with industrial architecture, but their functions have more common signs with residential and administrative buildings. Therefore modern barrack campuses represent a unique structural organism with its own functioning system.The primary mission of barracks was to accommodate and train soldiers of the national military service, which had to defend our country in the case of emergency. Compulsory military service came into existence in 1868 in former Austro-Hungarian Empire and this situation persists continuously until the creation of the professional army in 2006. Just shortly after the last soldier of national service left barrack campuses, architects and the general public started the discussion about their possible future reuse. The Monuments Board of the Slovak Republic has already done several pieces of research about the architectural and art values of selected barrack houses mostly from the period of 19th century, however, there was no work, which analysis barrack architecture in general and defines also its typology characteristics, historical growth and meaning. Therefore this dissertation focuses its research on barrack buildings and campuses in the whole territory of recent Slovakia. The first part of the paper describes and explains an architectural, historical and social evolution. The impact of the military architecture in the urban structure development illustrates the situation of eight major Slovak garrison towns. Selected chapter indicates according which criteria the military officials and engineers selected the proper location in the city and how their decisions influenced the urban structure in the future. The third part of the dissertation focuses on the barrack architecture. It outlines the relationship between the internal spaces of buildings, their construction parts and other elements providing their proper functioning. The final part of the research submits the register of selected purpose-built barracks constructed until the year 1939 together with the evaluation of their current state, thus creating a fundamental knowledge base of barrack architecture in Slovakia.