The New Museum's Building

he Belgrade City Assembly, as the founder of the Belgrade City Museum, did its best to provide the housing for the Museum and among the feasible solutions it chose, in collaboration with the management of the Museum, to allocate to it a representative military building in the centre of Belgrade. This is, namely, the edifice of the New Military Academy, designed by the architect Dimitrije T. Leko and built in 1899–1900; it fronts Nemanjina, Resavska and Birčaninova streets. The building covers a total area of about 10,000 square metres. It is not a listed heritage building.

The edifice of the New Military Academy. The plans of the present (upper centre) and the new buildings of the Belgrade City Museum; both plans are on the same scale.

The building covers a total area of about 10,000 square metres. It is not a listed heritage building.
It is unmistakably clear that the intent is not to simply house the museum, presently located in Zmaj Jovina Street, but to make a different, a genuine Belgrade City Museum in No. 40b Resavska Street: a museum that would enable unhindered care for museum objects, such as required by objects of heritage value, and would not impose limits on research and, especially, presentation of museum objects – through the Permanent and Main exhibitions, as well as through presentations in secondary exhibition spaces for national and international shows.
Taking into consideration some special features of the building in Resavska Street (for example, the original ball room surrounded by metal columns, cast in Budapest in 1899), the Museum could become the venue of various cultural events, more frequently scheduled than it is common in most museums.

THE MISSION

The Mission of the Belgrade City Museum, as a museum of a complex type, is to collect, protect, research and present the cultural heritage of Belgrade and the Belgrade area from the past seventy centuries. Due to the richness of its collections dating from various historical periods, the Museum could create comparative and trans-temporary presentations of this part of the world. Having in mid the calendar of destruction in Belgrade's history and the ravaging of urban culture, particularly in the 20th century and its closing years, the Museum should and is bound to join the persistent and hard struggle for genuine urbanity which, above all, bears the connotation of the dialogue culture.

THE VISION

The Vision of the Museum is to become a modern institution, as propulsive as a museum should be, a place of learning and joy both for Belgrade's citizens and all other visitors with an unmistakable identification potential for about one and a half million people, a likely audience frequenting the Museum in accordance with its gravitational capacity. After it gets moved into the new building, that in Resavska Street, the Museum must never encounter fundamental problems related to the protection of museum objects. According to the business plan of the Belgrade City Museum, its income should reach one-third of the annual budget foreseen for museum programmes.