Interesting Buildings in Kragujevac

Now that the traveling season starts and a few of my readers were asking for architectural tips outside from Belgrade, I decided to publish the most interesting buildings of smaller Serbian cities next to useful traveling information.

I started with Kragujevac and I choose the buildings that I like the most. Kragujevac is the center of the Sumadija region, the region that represent Serbia in all its stereotypes (for instance the Sumadija folk costume stands generally as illustration for Serbian national costume).

Blocks in Kragujevac (from flickr)

The architecture of Kragujevac is a mix of various styles: there are Oriental-Style buildings  (like the Amidža Konak from 1819-24) and Secession Style buildings  from 19th century. Then there are modern post-war concrete buildings (apartments to house those left homeless during World War II), high-rise commies (communist time blocks)  and some eye-catching buildings from the 70'ies (like the "Ipsilon" and the City Hall) that now characterize the city's panorama.

Kragujevac City Hall (Скупштина града)from Dinke at flickr


The Y - Building (Ипсилон) in Erdoglija District was built in the 70's and is Kragujevac's tallest building (60m, 17 floors)

 

Ipsilon Building from woodland at Skyscrapercity

The Golden Rose Shopping Center "Златна Ружа" is a cool building, however it needs some remodeling work. (from Johnny-kg at skyscrapercity)

Fire station in ulica Miloja Pavlovića (Ватрогасци дом) picture from skyscrapercity. Below an old picture of the building.

The fire station is a modernist building from 1932 (built in less than one year!)after the project of Đorđe Kovaljevski i Mihailo Radovanović, two Belgrade architects.

The "Zastava"-Building is a good example of soc-realism. (Picture from kawasaki KG at skyscrapercity)

The history behind the building and what happened to the Zastava Industry is a bit complexer. In a very simple and short form I see it like this: The biggest and flourishing Industry that produced some Yugoslavian legendary cars was wrecked by NATO bombings and later through Embargo  and Sanctions. Now Italy (who 11 years ago was bombing the buildings) is trying to produce FIAT cars in these buildings, to make cheaper production with cheap Serbian workers and taking away the works to many Torino based workers in Italy…..but that's business…
Main site of Zastava

An interesting building (I already wrote about this one here) is located a little outside Kragujevac in the Šumarice Memorial Park (Меморијални парк Шумарице), is the Museum of Genocide, on the site where  in WW II between 2'300 and 7'000 men and boys (the numbers differs a lot from source to source, but that's another issue…) were executed by the German occupation forces on October 20, 1941.
The project is made by Ivan Antic.
Antic designed the Museum of the Genocide in 1967. The grandness of the monumental building is emphasized by a series of tall pillar-like rectangular shapes, the tallest ones on the central part from which go the same ones of various height with massive parts of the walls built in brick.
The modern expression relates to medieval sacral architecture, and the symbol of the Museum of the Genocide is even stronger in the interior which lets natural light from roof lanterns, connecting the view to the skies with earthly life: the building and the crypt.

On May 14th 1999 due to the detonation of NATO attacks in the nearest vicinity the facades of the Museum were damaged and all glazed panels and roof lanterns destroyed. The nearby building of the Archives was badly damaged. (picture from skyscrapercity)

There is also a famous monument called "Broken Wings"-Monument created in 1963 by Serbian sculptor Miodrag Zivkovic.
 The monument is dedicated to the killed schoolchildren and their teachers.

"Broken wings" monument in Sumarice memorial park (picture from Balkanforum)


Here a few links with travel tips for Kragujevac:

http://www.kragujevac.rs
http://wikitravel.org/en/Kragujevac

And here a cool blog from JohnnyKG  that has pictures and further Kragujevac links.

http://johnny_kg.mojblog.rs/

NATO TARGET: Avala Tower finished!

11 years ago during the three month NATO bombing agression of Serbia the Mount Avala Tower was stupidly destroyed.

I write "stupidly" because Radio Television Serbia broadcasting did not suffer as it was relying on a network of local TV stations which were obliged to relay its program throughout the whole of Serbia. A special bomb was used to destroy the tower. The blast was one of the loudest explosions heard throughout Belgrade during the NATO bombardment.

All of the effort of the creators of this unique structure, which took five years to build (it was completed in 1965 with 4,000 tonnes of armored concrete and a 25-tonne 60-metre antenna) disappeared in just a few minutes. I made a post about the old tower here.

I followed on Beobuild how the re-construction was going on, and now after 3 years of works (but planning started in 2005) the tower is finished. The works were done by the workers of Ratko Mitrovic Dedinje Construction Firm (no, not my relative!).

Apart from the panoramic view and the restaurant covering 100 square metres at a height of 120 metres, there will be an additional 1,000 square metres of usable space for business and cultural activities at the foot of the tower.

 last works on the panorama-restaurant 

on top of the tower (pictures from beobuild)

 The reconstruction was suported by many artists, journalists and students, seeing it as a couragious act, in a continually economically challenged country like Serbia, but the symbolic act of raising such a tower was also the wish to show how pointless the NATO destruction was.

 The view from the tower 

(you see over Belgrade and over half of Sumadija)

But what was the reason for bombing Serbia (Yugoslavia) and why that focus on TV stations and antennas?
I'd like to share some interesting texts about it:
  

How U.S. Media Supported War Crimes in Yugoslavia

By Jim Naureckas

David Vs. Goliath: NATO Agression Against Serbia 

by de-construct.net

 

Exposing the Truth on NATO-US Agression against Yugoslavia
by Diana Johnstone

 

Avala Tower near Belgrade almost finished!

Recently a friend told me that he can see the Avala Tower from his 7th floor apartment in Vidikovac and that it looks almost finished. So I went to the beobuild site and downloaded the most interesting pictures to share here and to show how the works are going on.

It's planned to open the tower to the public on the end of July 2009. Works started in the beginning of 2007, so it would just 2 and a half year construction time.
(The original tower took about 4 years).

Here an older post I wrote about the tower where you find basic informations.

Jasmina Tesanovic - The diary of a political idiot

Another voice from the bombed capital of former Yugoslavia was Jasmina Tesanovic, author of The Diary of a Political Idiot. Her writing reflects a new kind of war that unfolded on BBC and CNN, watched by those inside Belgrade, where they learn of air strikes within their city, bemused when the foreign news gets the story wrong. Following the trajectory of Yugoslavia into war, Tesanovic’s diary takes the reader inside the city and appeals to the outside for understanding.

Political idiots

The idiots of the title and chapter reference the Greek roots of idiot: “a common person without access to knowledge and information”. Tesanovic writes that she and the majority of Serbs are political idiots. It now looks to me that also the Western people were the same political idiots, due to miss-information and manipulation made by War leaders. In the name of democracy and tolerance, people were willing to believe the most incredible lies!

The book:
Tesanovic, Jasmina. The Diary of a Political Idiot: Normal Life in Belgrade. San Francisco: Midnight Editions, 2000)
Here you can read here Diary from Belgrade online.(on the same link is the "DIARY OF SLOBODAN MARKOVIC" (EXCERPTS) a young student who wrote also a war-diary.

The film:
While her hometown was being blown up by 19 different countries and writing and uploading a diary, one day, a producer from German national TV phoned her. She’d been reading her online journal and thought it might make a good film.
Here about the making of that film.

Regards from Serbia by Zograf

While NATO was throwing bombs over Serbian territory, people where not really hiding in caves and holes (it's not like pictures you might remember of Kabul where all human beings desapeared from the surface). People went out, let themselves hear and some of them got really creative. One of the was Aleksandar Zograf (a.k.a. Sasa Rakezic) who with a comic: "Regards from Serbia" wrote a kind aof daily cronicle about the Bombing. He's emails to friends during the 78 days air-raid were also published on italian websites. His entire diary in italian (I couldn't find the english version though it exists) can be read here.

Zograf writes: “When the series of conflicts started, I was overwhelmed by the dark overtones of the reality that surrounded me…Suddenly the world around me became the source of nightmarish and intense images and experiences…The material reflecting the turbulent 90s was mostly quite bleak — some of the drawings seemed somehow distorted by my own rag e and misery.”

NOT TO FORGET NATO AGRESSION AGAINST SERBIA, TEN YEARS AFTER

Tomorrow it's 10 years!

This War was the first War in Europe after 1945, despite the fact that nobody wanted War in Europe anymore. It was the first War that was officially supported by the United Nation and the first War that was supported by left wing and democratic usually against War governments. The pacifistic movement strangely didn’t complain against this War, probably because it was lead by their people, by the „good“ ones. It seems that there are some „good“ and some „bad“ Wars, so it looks that the pacifists are just against the bad ones. So it was a "good" War?

Nato agression against Yugoslavia was accompaigned by mediatic lies, strumentalisated with ideologies and simplified with futile explanations.
Western people have been heavily fooled by NATO and democratic government's propaganda that used an absurd word with absolute no sense: the Humanitarian War. The War "to prevent a Humanitarian Catastrophe" killed thousands of people, contaminated the territory with landmines and depleted radioactive uranium (still a humanitarian and ecological problem now!) and left a geoplitical instable situation with the best roots for future Wars. Some states condemned the strikes as a unilateral use of force and a blatant violation of the United Nations Charter, while others said the action would prevent a humanitarian catastrophe resulting from Serbian attacks on Kosovar Albanians. (in 1999 there were 81% ethnic Albanians and 11% Serbs in Kosovo...so how realistic are these theories?!)

The representative of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia said NATO had been "unmasked", when it ceased to be a defensive military alliance and launched an act of the most brutal and unprovoked aggression. By bombing the cities of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, NATO had become the "air force and mercenary of the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)".
Yugoslavia had been attacked because it had used its sovereign right to fight terrorism and prevent the secession of a part of its territory which had always belonged to Serbia and Yugoslavia.

I prepared an extra information about NATO agression "Nato Trail - an unusual guide to Belgrade". You can download it here (pdf. 7MB) for free, and please send it to your friends!

This were the flyers that NATO threw from their airplanes over the cities:

Museum of Modern Art in Belgrade

The next few posts will be about one great Serbian architect who made some of my favorite buildings in Belgrade: Ivan Antic. Some of his building have been damaged by NATO Bombing 10 years ago.

An old pictures from the 60's showing the well composed facade
that takes care of aesthetics and of the needs of a museum

The Museum of Modern Art is situated in New Belgrade, on the left bank of the river Sava. The edifice was erected between 1961 and 1965 after the design of architects Ivan Antic and Ivanka Raspopovic, who were awarded the October Prize of the city of Belgrade in 1965 when the museum opened.

The Muesum from the Kalamegdan Fortress
blends nicley with the surrounding

This building represents an original architectural concept linking its interior with the exterior and at the same time meeting all the principals of a museum, thus ranking it among the most significant examples of modern museum architecture in in Serbia and the world in general.

The Museum was founded in 1958 aiming to collect, study and exhibit the works of modern Yugoslav art. Now the museum has a collection of more than 35,000 works of arts by Yugoslav artists: paintings and sculptures dating from 1900 up to the present day.
On April 28^th, when the Usce Business Center was bombed by NATO for the second time, the glazing of the Museum was blown off and and the Museum exhibits were damaged. The sculptures in the park surrounding the Museum sustained substantial damage too.

It is undergoing an €8 million renovation fully funded from the Government's National Investment.

Muzej savremene umetnosti
Museum of Contemporary Arts
Ušće 10. Blok 15
11070 Novi Beograd

Usce Tower - soon ready!

Not long time ago I wrote about the USCE Tower in Novi Beograd and showed here the new project for a second tower and a big Shopping Center.
In the meantime, the planned project changed, and should now look like the visualisation above.

The tower is ready and in use and the shopping center is taking shape. This it's like it looks in November 2008 (pictures from beobuilt).

Just in April 2007 the site looked lik this.


The reconstruction is made by: Dejan Sokolov and Đorđe Bobić of Slavija Biro and Branislav Redžić, Dragan Ivanović and Zoran Đorović of ARCVS, Belgrade

For the first tower, which is now ready, 30 Mio. Euro were invested. For the second tower (which is already aproved but it's still not known when realisation will start) it's estimated that 60 Mio. Euro will be invested.
USCE-tower transfomed itself from a symbol of communism (when it's still was called CK-Building from Centralni Komitet) to one of the most modern and elite business center of the balkans, though the complete oposite!

Even a comparison with the WTC in New York comes in my mind, when looking at the planned project.
USCE was attacked by NATO in 1999, it burned for several hours, but the structure didn't give up and the building was still standing.
Only 2 years later the WTC in New York was hit by a similar destiny.
What else they have in common: they were both civil building and got attacked because of their symbolic meaning.


What I particularly like about the USCE building is, when they put messges with lights on the fasade. It looks amazing how the building disapears and the sings glow in the dark.

NATO TARGET - Usce Tower (CK building)

Usce Tower was built in 1964 to serve as headquarters of the Central Committee of the League of Communists in the former Yugoslavia and was exclusively used for the Communist party. Until 2003 people called the building CeKa which stands for Centralni Komitet (Central Committee). With its 24 storeys, overlooking the Danube and Sava river it stands like a gateway to Novi Beograd. The competition projects for this building stirred up much discussion over the issues of symbolism. Until then, buildings for parties and goverment were built in the style of sociorealism, but this tower (designed also by Mihailo Janković ) was a simple aluminium and glass clad International style administrative type building of anonymous character void of any symbolism and represented the latest architectural modernity.

Destruction On April 21, 1999 NATO air strikes hit the building, setting the upper floors on fire. Several days later NATO repeated the attack. In total 12 Tomahawk missiles were fired at this building.

(A World Trade Center style destruction nearly occurred during the 1970s when Nikola Kavaja planned to board a Boeing 747 in Chicago, hijack it and hit USCE Tower to kill president Josip Broz Tito to signal the end of communism. However, minutes before he planned to hijack the plane, Kavaja was talked out of doing this by a priest, and spent 23 years in prison for his unsuccessful plan.)


Reconstruction

Reconstruction work on the building started in early 2003 and was completed in 2005. The multi-million dollar project has now 25 stories, totalling around 25,000 square meters of class A office space. An observation deck, fitness area and restaurant are located on the last level of the building.
The planned project is much bigger thougth. It will boast two towers (the second also with 25 floors) and a multifunctional office-commerical-sports centre. The complex will be 180000 square metres and the construction will cost 160 million Euros.
There will also be one underground floor of the shopping mall, while the remaining two floors of the mall will be above ground. The shopping mall will have a total commercial space area of 36000 square metres and will feature cafes, restaurants, boutiques, stores, furniture stores, banks, and pharmacies. The third part of the complex will have a multiplex theatre and sports recreation centre.

Here some pics from beobult and MPC Holding, about the planned complex: