Genex Tower

The name Genex Group remained on the complex from the Yugoslav company that had its headquarters here; it traded abroad and operated tourism and air transport. Alongside the business floors, the taller tower contained one hundred eighty-four apartments, and people still live there. The two concrete towers, of different heights, are linked by a two-story bridge, and above it hangs the round restaurant hall: it was intended to rotate, but the floor never moved even once. They are called Genex Tower because of their silhouette beside the road from the airport, although there is no passage between the towers.

At a drawn-out meeting at the Belgrade Urban Planning Institute, at the turn of the nineteen sixties and seventies, the architect Mihajlo Mitrović took out his trade-union card and sketched two identical high-rises connected at the top. At the time, he faced a much more modest task: to design an ordinary multistory building with premises for the district administration in Block thirty-three. Mitrović wanted to place a landmark at the western entrance to Belgrade that could not be confused with the neighboring residential buildings.

In the final design, he made one tower taller than the other, linked them with a two-story bridge, and raised a round superstructure above the lower tower. This is how the official name Genex Tower came about. The highway from the airport to the center passes beside both towers: they are a gateway in the city's silhouette, not a pass-through arch.

Planning commissions refused to approve such a height. Mitrović was asked who had authorized him to build thirty stories; he kept bringing back the calculations and arguing that the even blocks of New Belgrade needed a prominent vertical. A newspaper cartoon alongside the project even showed a gallows intended for the architect. Mitrović nevertheless obtained permission, and in nineteen seventy-one the builders laid the foundation.

He also had a personal stake. Mitrović set aside the two-story bridge between the towers for his own apartment and studio. The family had six members; the design office had already agreed to take his former apartment on Kondina Street in exchange for the new home above.

When the builders reached the fourteenth floor, the heads of Genex Group bought the entire complex—the completed section and the floors not yet built. Genex Group was the shortened name of Genex Group, a major Yugoslav association for foreign trade, tourism, and air transport. Its representatives made deals in dozens of countries, sold Yugoslav goods abroad, and imported cars, equipment, beverages, and other scarce goods. The lower tower housed the headquarters with open-plan office floors, while the taller one contained one hundred eighty-four apartments, some of which went to employees. The architect's apartment disappeared from the project. In nineteen eighty, the complex began operating, and the company's name remained attached to it even after Genex Group itself left.

Mitrović conceived the round superstructure after a trip to Frankfurt, where he saw a revolving panoramic restaurant and obtained its drawings. The heads of Genex Group established an in-house restaurant here for executives and guests. According to the architect's recollections, they declined to install the mechanism for the rotating floor so that they would not be blamed for costly feasts. The restaurant opened, but the hall never made a single revolution.

People still live in the taller tower, while the lower one remains the former headquarters of Genex Group. Between them hangs the two-story bridge where Mitrović planned to house his family and set up his studio. The round hall above it has remained still.