State Postage Stamp Printing Factory

The competition work for the building of the State Postage Stamp Printing Factory in Belgrade is one of the lesser-known Zloković projects from the mature period of creativity, which is now available to researchers in the Milan Zloković Collection at the Museum of the City of Belgrade. The state markarnica, an institution where postage and tax stamps and other securities were printed, was located before the Second World War in low barracks in the area at the foot of Senjak (on the corner of Vojvode Mišića Boulevard and Ruska Street). On the nearby empty plot, the construction of a new marker building is planned, for which a competition was announced in 1936. The competition envisaged the construction of the main building, which would have a basement, ground floor and three floors, and would be located on the lower plot along the main street, and a villa for the director, several residential buildings for marker employees and a kindergarten for children of employees in the area of the upper plot (behind the main building, on the corner of Ruska and Nova streets). According to this program, Zloković also elaborates his solution in which a specific prose of rationalist evocation is recognized. The architecture of the main building, the focus of the project, is dominated by the structure of the main facade membrane in relation to the internal organization and the height stratification of the building towards the second plot, i.e., residential buildings.