Usce Tower - soon ready!

Not long time ago I wrote about the USCE Tower in Novi Beograd and showed here the new project for a second tower and a big Shopping Center.
In the meantime, the planned project changed, and should now look like the visualisation above.

The tower is ready and in use and the shopping center is taking shape. This it's like it looks in November 2008 (pictures from beobuilt).

Just in April 2007 the site looked lik this.


The reconstruction is made by: Dejan Sokolov and Đorđe Bobić of Slavija Biro and Branislav Redžić, Dragan Ivanović and Zoran Đorović of ARCVS, Belgrade

For the first tower, which is now ready, 30 Mio. Euro were invested. For the second tower (which is already aproved but it's still not known when realisation will start) it's estimated that 60 Mio. Euro will be invested.
USCE-tower transfomed itself from a symbol of communism (when it's still was called CK-Building from Centralni Komitet) to one of the most modern and elite business center of the balkans, though the complete oposite!

Even a comparison with the WTC in New York comes in my mind, when looking at the planned project.
USCE was attacked by NATO in 1999, it burned for several hours, but the structure didn't give up and the building was still standing.
Only 2 years later the WTC in New York was hit by a similar destiny.
What else they have in common: they were both civil building and got attacked because of their symbolic meaning.


What I particularly like about the USCE building is, when they put messges with lights on the fasade. It looks amazing how the building disapears and the sings glow in the dark.