Nikola Tesla Museum at the Milan Vapa Paper Mill

The back story

The paper mill on today’s Bulevar vojvode Mišića was built between 1921 and 1924 by the industrialist Milan Vapa, the first factory raised in Serbia after the First World War. Paper was made and stored here until the Second World War, and the building later served other uses; many Belgraders know it as the Jugošped building. It is a protected cultural monument.

A new home for Tesla

The Nikola Tesla Museum, visited by more than 170,000 people a year, keeps the scientist’s original archive, entered on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register in 2003. On Krunska street it has only about 200 square metres for display, so much of the collection stays in its depots. The mill stands on a plot of 7,200 square metres, with more than 8,400 square metres over two floors: about twenty times the space.

The collection holds more than 1,200 registered items, from original machines to Tesla’s clothes, medals and decorations, and his personal archive fills 548 boxes. At the new address visitors will see far more of it, with more working models of his inventions, his personal library and 57 albums of about 13,000 newspaper clippings.

The design

An international competition drew 46 entries, and first prize went to Zaha Hadid Architects of London with the Belgrade studio Bureau Cube Partners. Their design draws on Tesla’s magnetic fields and his idea of sending electricity without wires: spherical forms and circles shape the entrance foyer, which opens into a Grand Atrium, with galleries of historic objects and interactive displays.

Belgrade Waterfront is funding the reconstruction under a contract with the Ministry of Culture, and the mill stays under the protection of the city’s Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments. An opening date has not yet been announced.

Our advice: until the move, visit the Nikola Tesla Museum in its current home on Krunska street in Vračar.