ZHA Designs Nikola Tesla Museum

Nikola Tesla was born into an ethnic Serb family in Smiljan, in modern-day Croatia, in 1856, and died in New York City in 1943. While Smiljan is home to the Nikola Tesla Memorial Center, the current home of the Nikola Tesla Museum, which celebrates the famed engineer, futurist, and inventor who hardly needs any introduction, is on Krunska Street in Belgrade, in a nearly 100-year-old villa that was converted into the museum the decade after his death. Although the museum contains Tesla's remains and thousands of historical documents, "very little is on display in the small ground floor exhibition space," per Wikipedia, pointing to the need for new facilities.

The museum's new, larger home is being funded by Belgrade Waterfront, which held an open international competition last year with the Urban Planning Institute of Belgrade. The competition program envisions the new Tesla Museum as one of four museums comprising a planned new museum quarter in Belgrade, stretching from Savski Square to Resavska Street and Mostar Interchange and consisting of the Historical Museum, Children’s Museum, Nikola Tesla Museum, and Belgrade City Museum.

The competition-winning design by London's ZHA, under project director Manuela Gatto, with Belgrade's Bureau Cube Partners, preserves much of the protected Milan Vapa Paper Mill, which was built in 1924 and abandoned about a decade ago, including its historic chimney. Portions of the facades, roofs, and interior walls are opened up and carved away, replaced with curved surfaces that are indicative of ZHA's oeuvre, but here are done with materials befitting the existing building and former industrial context. A new circular opening in the factory's western facade will serve as the main entry and lead visitors to the triple-height atrium anchored by the chimney, as seen in the rendering at top. Accentuating Tesla's pioneer role in electrifying the world, the immersive Tesla Electronic Transformer Gallery, visible in the rendering at bottom, will feature a 12-million-volt transformer. No anticipated completion or opening for the museum was announced.