Guided by: Dragana Mecanov
Sunday, 26.04.2025, from 10.00 to 14.00
→ Narodnih heroja 45
Mihajlo Mitrović (1922-2018) is one of the indispensable figures in the study and historiography of 20th century architecture in our country. In 1948, he graduated from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade, during the turbulent period of the first years after World War II. In the context of the first five-year industrialization plan (1947-1952) and the break with the Eastern Bloc, he began a creative era that would bring about one hundred architectural achievements. Versatile and talented, focused on modern 20th-century architecture, in 1950, he spent time in Denmark and France, later overseeing the most significant modernist buildings during their construction in Brazil, Chandigarh, and Sydney.
The persistence with which he continued his work has contributed to our inheritance of some of the most significant representative examples of modernist architecture. Together with architects Jovanka Jeftanović, Radivoje Tomić, and collaborators from his office “Projektbiro”, over several decades of work, Mitrović designed some of the most authentic buildings of 20th-century architecture. Mihajlo Mitrović also worked in Paris, as well as in various locations across former Yugoslavia and many cities in Serbia. This year’s BINA Walk will offer visitors the opportunity to tour the interior of the GENEX Tower and visit the well-preserved restaurant on its top floor. One of his most significant works, it is also one of the purest examples of brutalist architecture – the Genex business-residential building, which is protected as a cultural monument. The engagement of artists in enriching modern residential architecture in the second half of the 20th century simultaneously represented a reevaluation of the principles of modernism – through reintroduction of sculpture and the abandonment of an approach that a priori rejects artistic details in postwar residential buildings.
