Former Embassy of Yugoslavia at Seminarstrasse 5

About the building

In the Kirchenfeld villa district, a building at Seminarstrasse 5 catches the eye at once. Above two storeys of precast concrete elements sits a copper-covered mansard hipped roof, broken into many planes and opened up in several places. The colours come from the materials: grey exposed concrete, the green of the copper, brown window frames and wooden doors, and ochre-yellow wall panels.

The client was the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. A teachers' house of the nearby Muristalden seminary previously stood on the plot and was demolished in 1976; the new building was erected from 1976 to 1978. It was designed by the Belgrade architect Aleksandar Keković, chief architect at the Yugoslav state construction company Energoprojekt, which built power stations, hospitals and schools in Yugoslavia and above all in Africa. The country had been represented diplomatically in Bern long before: the Kingdom of Serbia from 1917, and Switzerland recognised Tito's government on 4 May 1945.

The building thrives on the contrast between closed and open parts. The continuous eaves, the balconies and the moulded piers give it a fortified quality; the pierced roof surfaces, the large undivided windows and the light walls open it up again. The City of Bern's heritage office places it in a late modernism with brutalist and already postmodern traits, as seen on state buildings in Belgrade in the 1970s. As a comparison it names the National Library of Serbia by Ivo Kurtović (1973), built a few years earlier, above all because of the roofscape, and in Bern the nearby Brunnadern housing estate by Atelier 5 (1969–1972).

After the break-up of Yugoslavia the house passed to its successor; today it is the embassy and consulate of the Republic of Serbia. In 2018 Serbia was looking for a buyer for a time, but the plans to move were not carried out. In the city's building inventory it is listed as worthy of protection.

A detail to look for: the reliefs on the side boundary walls, which carry the building's wealth of forms right up to the edge of the plot.

Researched and summarised by Bärn Kit. Sources: Bauinventar der Stadt Bern: Seminarstrasse 5 · Wikipedia (de): Seminarstrasse 5 · Wikidata: Q138788016