Belgrade Fair

For a long time, the issue of building a fair that would suit Belgrade as the capital of Yugoslavia and the main economic and administrative center of the country has been raised. Although a special association was founded in 1923  with the aim of improving all branches of the economy, in which the organization of fairs was supposed to be of primary importance, only during the first half of the 1930s did more concrete activities take place on the realization of this idea. At that time, for numerous practical reasons, a terrain on the left bank of the Sava river, with an area of ​​about 30 hectares, near the King Alexander I Bridge, was proposed, primarily due to the proximity of the river and the city center, as well as possibilities for its spatial expansion. The architectural competition for the construction of the Belgrade Fair was announced by the Society for Organizing the Fair in Belgrade in February 1936. However, as the outcome of the competition did not satisfy the requirements of the Belgrade municipality, the development of the plan of the fair and the pavilion was entrusted to the municipal architects. Compared to the implemented solution, according to which the fairgrounds are treated in the form of a small city structure with the main central benchmark in the center (square) and a system of streets around which pavilions are grouped, Zloković had a completely different idea of ​​the fairgrounds as a more complex trade and economic unit in which would not single out individual pavilions of representative expression, but it would be an organic system of the fair complex that could be developed in stages and adapted to the needs of time and opportunities. Zloković used the proximity of the river to form docks with storage terminals and exhibition hangars in the image of industrial complexes. The pavilions would be of simple utilitarian architecture, and erected like pile dwellings on pillars, while most of them would be constructed in a wooden structure and connected by access parallels.