Nikola Dobrović ( sr-Cyrl, Никола Добровић, ; 12 February 1897 – 11 January 1967) was a Serbian architect, teacher, and urban planner. Dobrović designed a number of buildings including the Yugoslav Ministry of Defence building, later destroyed during the

1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) carried out an aerial bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War. The air strikes lasted from 24 March 1999 to 10 June 1999. The bombings continued until an a ...

Biography

Dobrović was born in the Hungarian city of Pécs, 1897. He got his degree in architecture in 1923 from the High Technical School in

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

. After gaining experience in prominent Prague architectural offices and in his own practice, he moved to

Dubrovnik Dubrovnik (), historically known as Ragusa (; see notes on naming), is a city on the Adriatic Sea in the region of Dalmatia, in the southeastern semi-exclave of Croatia. It is one of the most prominent tourist destinations in the Mediterran ...

in the early nineteen-thirties with the radical, programmatic mission of bringing modern architecture to this small but historically very important city on the Dalmatian coast. He was invited in 1930 by Dubrovnik municipal conservator Kosta Strajnić, well known as the author of the first monographs on

Josip Plečnik Josip () is a male given name found among Croats and Slovenes, a cognate of Joseph. In Croatia, the name Josip was the second most common masculine given name in the decades up to 1959, and has stayed among the top ten most common ones throughout 2 ...

and the sculptor

Ivan Meštrović Ivan Meštrović (; 15 August 1883 – 16 January 1962) was a Croatian sculptor, architect, and writer. He was the most prominent modern Croatian sculptor and a leading artistic personality in contemporary Zagreb. He studied at Pavle Bilinić's ...

, to explain to the authorities what modern architecture actually was. To depict in the local press the exemplary architecture that would be suited to the so-called new, modern Dubrovnik, Strajnić put forward Dobrović’s radical project for hotel-Kursalon on Pile, in close proximity to the most monumental part of the medieval city walls, as an alternative to the eclectic project by the Viennese architect Alfred Keller. As for Dobrović, although his project was never to be realized, his entrance to Dubrovnik was truly grand.

Notes

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Dobrovic, Nikola 1897 births 1967 deaths People from Pécs Brutalist architects Serbian architects 20th-century Serbian people Austro-Hungarian emigrants to Yugoslavia Austro-Hungarian Serbs