Photo: Linh Dinh
ART Nouveau BEAUTY: Belgrade’s Hotel Moskova. Its architect, also designed the Parliament Building, just a few blocks away.
Linh Dinh
Reflections on Belgrade’s architecture of cruelty I’d rather dwell in a quaint and quirky hovel than any heroic edifice
T
here’s a brisk wind this morning. Summer is almost done. On Belgrade’s Zdravka Čelara, two women are taking their sons to school. Although the boys are old enough to hump their own backpacks, these burdens are slung over their mothers’ shoulders. The kids are dressed in cheerful shirts,
pants, socks and shoes, and their moms are similarly colourful, a rebuttal to the grey and beige concrete of nearly all the buildings glowering and glooming over them. You know you’re in Eastern Europe when you see all these monstrous, brutalist blocks that still enclose most citizens. In the US, similar buildings existed to ware-
32 ColdType | October 2020 | www.coldtype.net
house welfare blacks, mostly, but nearly all have been torn down. After two miserable decades, the 33-building Pruitt–Igoe in St Louis was dynamited in the 70’s. Its architect, Minoru Yamasaki, is best known for the Twin Towers, which were also purposely pulled. What should be his epitaph, I wonder? On my first visit to NYC in 1979, I
