AGG+ (Mar 2024)
Contribution to the Research on New Belgrade: The Unbuilt Projects and the Concepts of Nikola Dobrović
Abstract
Architect Nikola Dobrović is best known in Serbia for his only constructed building in Belgrade, the complex of the State Secretariat of National Defense (DSNO), better known as the General Staff, today an endangered cultural heritage and a crumbling building with an uncertain future. However, his short-term engagement as the head of the Urban Planning Institute of the Republic of Serbia from 1946-1947, and his later professorship at the Faculty of Architecture University of Belgrade, are equally significant for Belgrade and Serbia. Documents testifying to the post-war period of his work are scattered in several places: in the Urban Planning Institute of Belgrade, the Museum of Science and Technology, the Historical Archive of Belgrade, and the rare publications can only be found in a few libraries in Serbia. In the course of his short-term work on New Belgrade, Dobrović provided several conceptual projects and sketches for New Belgrade within the Urban Planning Institute: the perfomance square, road schemes and the urban planning solution of the zone between the Palace of the Federation and the Railway Station - today's Central Zone of New Belgrade. Finally, at different stages of his career, Dobrović also designed individual objects, such as the project for the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, which remained in the domain of 'paper architecture', unbuilt, and which provides an insight into the way he thought about the process of urban and spatial planning, through the positioning of builidngs which would've generated the character of their immediate and distant surroundings.
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