The Sava Centre is one of Belgrade's premier congress and cultural facilities — a large-scale modernist complex on the Sava riverfront in New Belgrade that was built to host international conferences, exhibitions, and performances at a moment when Yugoslavia was a significant player in the Non-Aligned Movement and hosted major international events.
Designed by Stojan Maksimović and completed in 1979, the building combines a congress hall, hotel, and cultural spaces within a single massed structure on the riverside. The architecture is characteristically Yugoslav in its ambitions: large, confident, technically sophisticated, and entirely free of the ideological timidity that constrained architecture in Warsaw Pact countries. Yugoslavia's non-alignment gave its architects the freedom to borrow from anywhere, and the Sava Centre shows it — this could be a building from almost any confident modernist tradition of the period.