Three inspirational modernist realizations by Croatian architects in Belgrade

A rapid pace of population growth in the Yugoslav capital (from 90.000 inhabitants in 1919 to 350.000 in 1939) had an impact on its architectural and urban transformation supported by foreign capital and educated professionals. From an underdeveloped and "neglected" (as Le Corbusier critically spoke of it in 1913) small oriental town, which in the last 25 years of the 19th century quickly acquired a distinctly European flavour, Belgrade grew after the First World War into a representative capital of a multinational kingdom. Although long blocks of residential and office buildings for rent provided ample opportunity to adopt and promote innovative architectural methods, this process was slowed down due to the conservative social environment. It was not until the late 1920s that a major breakthrough came with the Croatian architects who followed modernist tendencies. The first buildings interpolated into the existing city blocks with the aim to modernize them were the Palaviccini's single-family house with the studio designed by Vjekoslav Mursec, the Yugoslav United Bank designed by Hugo Ehrlich (1929-30), and the Journalists Association building (1934-35) designed by Ernest Weissmann in the mid 1930s which rounded off this innovative series. Besides the fact that these realizations were conceptually progressive within the entire architectural production of their authors, they also gave the Serbian architects a powerful incentive to more firmly embrace the new architectural principles. An unrivalled example of the collaboration between the Croatian and Czech builders in Belgrade between the two world wars was the single-family house with a garden (1928-29), owned by the renowned Yugoslav sculptor Petar Palaviccini (18871958), built on his estate at 6, Teodosijeva st. (today Jelena Cetkovic street). This rather unobtrusive two-storey house with a pitched roof, built on the fringe of what was the town centre at the time, completed a small square called Kopitareva gradina. Inspired by functionalism in central European architecture, the architect applied the modernist principles in his design and thus made an innovative step in the context of the local architectural milieu. Typologically, this house belongs to the first single-family houses with studios in Belgrade whose designs were based on modern architectural principles, along with Zlokovic's own house in Kotez Neimar. Palaviccini's house with a studio is one of the earliest examples of Belgrade's modern arc