Grade “A” Belgrade

The Balkan city gets its groove back.

By Karim Rashid

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I came to Belgrade two years ago for a lecture at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a 1960s structure facing the Danube, and have seen a rapid change since. Last year, I helped organize the first Belgrade Design Week, led by Jovan Jelovec and Maja Vidakovic with Mikser, a team of young architects. We invited design giants Luigi Colani (the grandfather of Biomorphism), Gaetano Pesce and Ross Lovegrove, along with Konstantin Grcic. We took part in great shows, parties and intense discourse about the enlightenment of Belgrade.

Dating back to 4800 BC, this cultural and economic hub of the Balkans is full of monumental architecture. But most is from the era when it was the Yugoslavian capital (1918 to 2003) with few ruins remaining. (Funding for preservation is a prevalent problem in the aftermath of the war.) There are still many vestiges of buildings in the heart of the city – reminders of the bombing of a beautiful Eastern European epicentre, the fourth largest Eastern European city behind Istanbul, Athens and Bucharest.

The old city’s main pedestrian shopping street is Knez Mihailova Ulica, where buskers play classic Balkan folk songs – these young boys have been playing the accordion and fiddle since they were five years old! – and musicians sing Pink Floyd songs in Serbian. The street is littered with fashion boutiques, book shops, galleries and restaurants. Contemporary design is becoming the norm, with hip young stores like Buzz carrying limited edition runners, local design objects and global design books.

New Belgrade, just across the river, is a sprawling urban development of the last 35 years. My favourite buildings are the SIV (the federal executive council building), a horizontal Modernist slab of concrete, and the Brutalist-style Sava Center – real 1960s and ’70s icons. Aside from generic glass office towers, there are new hotels and restaurants, like the stylish Plato and Balkan Ekspres, overlooking the river. A design hotel called IN Hotel is under construction, with a changing colour-LED facade that’s now a ubiquitous trend.

The very social Belgradians hang out in coffee bars, like the new Coffee Dream café. (Majik, a cybercafé I designed, will open next month.) SPLAVs – Serbian for restaurant bars on the water – turn into hotspots at night for the turbo folk, the city’s glam rock types. There is always time for drinks, including rakija, a party starter made of fruit. The Serbians are so positive about building a metropolis and so proud of their culture. Their passion for contemporary life can make miracles happen.

Globalove,

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