Prefabricated residential buildings in New Belgrade

Mass housing construction after the Second World War required finding new models for faster and more efficient construction, which would be at the same time rational enough and architecturally developed to provide comfortable housing. Zloković believed that within the limits of economic possibilities, with direct cooperation with the construction industry, the apartment – as a basic functional and social unit, can be solved better and more meaningfully by meeting the real, material and psychological needs of a human of the 20th century, in addition to comfortable, sunny and interconnected rooms, peace in and around them – protected from street noise and crowds, with greenery in the surroundings. In countries with more developed industrial potential, cooperation between technical production and architects  could be more significantly manifested and “pave the way for a new architecture – the architecture of the machine age”. Architect Zloković also advocated for these potentials of the 20th century, claiming that “today’s architecture is in an acute phase of turmoil and that the break with traditional methods of construction requires a fundamentally changed way of spatial design.” From these motives, a project for typical prefabricated buildings for New Belgrade was created, made in cooperation with the architect Đorđe Zloković (son). Starting from the basic modular measure expressed through a modular network (matrix), the design principle applied in all three dimensions and in all aspects of the design process has been developed. The authors propose a new constructive grid, the internal structure of housing units, and the organizational structure of the apartment (different sizes – from a studio to a five-room apartment) and the shaped composition of the facade membrane derived from the basic module of prefabricated elements.