Western City Gate, also known as Genex Tower, is a 35-floor skyscraper located in Belgrade, the capital city of the Republic of Serbia. Most often, the building is compared with the Trellick Tower in London, UK, and even though it has some resemblance, they are definitely different.
The Western City Gate is built in a brutalist architectural style, which gives it a massive solidity and abstracted geometric form, in contrast to the lightness and rectilinearity of steel and glass in mainstream modernism. The building was designed in 1977 by Mihajlo Mitrović, and it is formed by two functionally different towers connected with a two-storey bridge and a revolving restaurant at the top of the building.
From the architectural and structural point of view, both towers serve as one entity, because in reality, they can operate as separate units. There is a residential tower which has a ground floor, mezzanine, 30 floors with an attic, and on the other hand, there is the business tower which also has a ground floor, mezzanine, but 26 floors with an attic. In total, without the restaurant on top, it is 115 meters (377 ft) tall; however, with the restaurant, it is 140 meters (459 ft). The Genex Tower, at one point in history, was the second-tallest building in the country, right after Ušće Tower, but with the modernization of Belgrade, the West City Gate was bumped down the list of tallest structures in Serbia.
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As previously mentioned, both buildings are connected by a bridge structure, which is located on the 26th floor of the residential tower and the attic of the business tower. The restaurant on top of the building is designed exactly on the highest level of the business tower so that it would offer sweeping views of the city and mesmerizing sunset views.
In addition to this, all of the staircases of both the apartment and office towers are directly connected to the garage, and each building has two circular staircases with a set of lifts. Both buildings are of reinforced concrete skeleton structure with supporting walls, which gives a stark and quite strong impression that the building can last for a long time, even in the worst possible scenario.
As per the Yugoslav authorities, the official purpose of the towers was to be a high-rise gate that would greet everyone arriving in the city of Belgrade from the West. Interestingly, the name Genex Tower was given because Genex, which was a major Yugoslav state-owned trading company based in Belgrade, occupied the business part of the towers, hence why it was logical to name it after them.
