View of the First Block during construction

The First and Second residential blocks of New Belgrade are the first residential blocks of the new city on the left bank of the Sava river, the formation and construction of which began after the Second World War. The general lack of housing, one of the biggest problems in post-war Belgrade, required speed in construction and cheaper processes. Therefore, an experimental construction site was organized for the construction of these blocks. On it, in order to accelerate construction, but also due to the weaker bearing capacity of the terrain, it was made a skeletal system developed at the Institute for Material Testing of Serbia was applied, under the leadership of Branko Žeželj. The system consisted of prefabricated pre-stressed concrete slabs, dimensions 4.20 x 4.20 meters, which were assembled on the construction site itself, and which can be seen on the present photography, in the foreground. The design team of these blocks, built from 1959 to 1963, consisted of architects and engineers Branko Petričić, Tihomir Ivanović, Dušan Milenković and Branko Žeželj. There are five types of buildings in them, divided into residential towers with emphasized verticality and residential buildings where the horizontality dominates. Ten types of apartments have been conceived, with an area of about 15 m2 per one inhabitant.