Building
The current Parliament building is located in downtown Belgrade, on the Nikola Pašić Square №13, in front of Pioneer's Park. It is officially called Dom Narodne Skupštine (Дом Народне Скупштине, "House of the National Assembly"). The Parliament of Serbia moved into this building on 23 July 2006 following the dissolution of the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro. Prior to becoming the parliament of Serbia, it served as the seat of parliament for Yugoslavia and the State Union. During the time of Yugoslavia and the State Union, the parliament of Serbia convened in another building on Kralja Milana street.
Construction on the building started in 1907, with the cornerstone being laid by King Peter I. The building was based on a design made by Konstantin Jovanović in 1891; a variant of that design made by Jovan Ilkić, which won a competition in 1901. World War I delayed construction, and the original plans to the building were lost. Reconstruction of the plans were made by Ilkić's son Pavle. The interior was designed by Nikolaj Krasnov. It was designed in the manner of academic traditionalism. The construction of the building was completed in 1936 and the first session in the new edifice was held on October 20 of the same year. At the time, it was the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. In September 1939, the Assembly was dissolved and during the Second World War it was occupied by the aggressor's civil administration for Serbia. Several decades after the end of the war, this was the building of the Assembly of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, in the 1990s, this edifice became the seat of the Assembly of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and later the seat of the Parliament of Serbia and Montenegro. On June 5, 2006, Serbia became an independent republic, thus, the parliament building became the House of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia.
The National Assembly House covers an area of 13,400 m2 and contains four floors: subterranean part, ground floor, first floor and attic and mezzanines – below the subterranean part, between the subterranean part and ground floor and between the ground floor and first floor. The building contains 100 offices, great and small plenary halls and four committee halls with full conference equipment. All the halls are air-conditioned. The building is equipped with computers, printers, scanners and fax machines, has an internal television channel and computer network with a non-stop internet connection. The library, situated on the first floor of the National Assembly, has an area of 165 m2 and contains over 60,000 books.
A sculpture by Toma Rosandić, Igrali se konji vrani ("Play of Black Horses"), was placed in front of the building in 1939.
A clip of the parliament building burning (which happened during the October fifth demonstrations) can be seen in the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008). The building is shown on the five thousand Serbian dinar banknote. The parliament building appears to have served as inspiration in the Half-Life 2 video game, featured as the Overwatch Nexus. The parliament building was also featured in the movie Coriolanus (2011).
Group visits to the National Assembly are organised every day, between 9.00 a.m. and 4 p.m.
Read more about this topic: National Assembly (Serbia)
Famous quotes containing the word building:
“History is a child building a sand-castle by the sea, and that child is the whole majesty of man’s power in the world.”
—Heraclitus (c. 535–475 B.C.)
“... what’s been building since the 1980’s is a new kind of social Darwinism that blames poverty and crime and the crisis of our youth on a breakdown of the family. That’s what will last after this flurry on family values.”
—Stephanie Coontz (b. 1944)
“People do not know the natural infirmity of their mind: it does nothing but ferret and quest, and keeps incessantly whirling around, building up and becoming entangled in its own work, like our silkworms, and is suffocated in it: a mouse in a pitch barrel.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)