According to information available to the media, the most serious candidate for the director of the City Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments is Aleksandar Ivanović, conservator and architect. He should succeed Olivera Vučković, who recently resigned because she did not want to participate in removing the status of cultural property from the General Staff complex.
The Ministry of Economy and the Ministry of Construction are in a hurry to choose someone who will be willing to do the job, so that the state can fulfill "Agreement on the revitalization of the complex of the former Federal Secretariat for National Defense (SSNO), which is known asazi on the corner of Kneza Miloša and Nemanjina streets" signed by Goran Vesić with the American company Afinity Global Development.
The contract is not available to the public, but among the details that have reached the public is the one according to which the General Staff is to be demolished two months after the election in order to start the construction of a block with an inappropriate density of buildings, floors and outdated architecture, dominated by three towers high by 150 meters.
In an atmosphere when the profession and the public are against the demolition of the General Staff, when 30 associations and more than 6000 individuals signed the Declaration on the fate of the General Staff and the Belgrade Fair, when the director of the Republican Tavod for the Protection of Cultural Monuments resigned, and they were supported by the Association of Conservators of Serbia and ICOMOS, ministers Sinisa Mal and Goran Vesić did not find it easy to find a man who would bring down the General Staff.
However, Aleksandar Ivanovic appeared.
He told the Tanjug agency this month that the ruins and building remains of the complex of buildings of the General Staff of the architect Nikola Dobrović are practically the remains of what was once a cultural asset in its entirety and could be declared a cultural asset.
"Elements due to which Generalshatab could, at the time he possessed them, apply from the level of previous protection to the declaration of the so-called cultural property and cultural monument, in the procedure that is legally known under the Law on Cultural Property, now no longer exist," Ivanović said.
"The criteria on the basis of which the General Staff as an architectural object can be current as a candidate for a cultural monument have disappeared completely." The functionality of the internal space of the specific building is completely damaged, and the functionality of the external connections, internal streets are also lost, and these are important criteria for the building to be a candidate as an element of valorization for cultural heritage," Ivanović said.
Aleksandar Ivanović started his career at the City Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, from where he moved to the Museum of the City of Belgrade. He left there by mutual agreement, because he did not fulfill the obligation regarding the completion of writing the book. Since then, for more than 15 years, he has been engaged in construction.
Aleksandar Ivanovic is not a man of the public. He spoke at the promotion of the monograph Architecture of the General Staff building (2001, Army) by Bojan Kovačević, dealing only with this work by Nikola Dobrović. Let us remind you that the General Staff was only declared a cultural asset in 2005, so it is understandable that this topic was not part of his speech.
The next time we see him is this March, when, it is not known on what occasion, he made the statement quoted a moment ago about the General Staff. If we remember that the news about the signing of the contract between Goran Vesić and Jared Trump on the lease of the General Staff complex for 99 years was made on May 15, this unprovoked appearance of Ivanovic before that signing seems non-accidental.
Colleagues who know him remember that he had aspirations towards the director's chair of the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments in Belgrade.
