The competition work for the building of the Home for the Disabled in Mali Kalemegdan is a lesser-known Zloković project from an earlier period of creativity, which is now available to researchers in the archive collection of Milan Zloković at the Belgrade City Museum. Created in the year of the formation of the Group of Architects of the Modern Direction (1928), this project testifies to a more complete acceptance of modernist aesthetics and morphological principles in the conception of a massive building with a block structure. The shape of the combined-use building – business and collective housing – is characterized by a fully geometric cube with a regular grid of square window openings ranging from the first to the fourth floor that extends along two street facades, while the ground floor area, where business facilities are planned, is fully open with a series of glazed shop windows, which achieved a visual relief of the upper zone and suggested a connection with the urban space. One of the street facades has a convexly curved surface which gives the massive volume an expressive effect. The corner where the two street facades meet is accentuated by a decorative relief vertical from the first to the third floor, which marks the position of the building.
Belgrade, Serbia
Kralja Milutina 33
1926–1927
Among several residential buildings designed for the Belgrade investor and owner Josif Šojat, an interpolated multi-storey building (residential building with rented apartments) in 33 Kralja Milutina Street stands out, with which Zloković brought the spirit of Mediterranean profane architecture into the Vračar city agglomeration, making several form gestures atypical for the previous Belgrade architecture.
