On September 24, 1981, the skyline of Užice, Serbia, gained a new silhouette—a 15-story concrete behemoth clawing at the clouds. To its architect, Svetlana Kana Radević, it was a manifesto of modernist defiance; to locals, it was either “Sivonja” (the Gray One), a slab of socialist austerity, or “The Rocket,” a launchpad for a city’s rebirth. This is the story of the Old Hotel Zlatibor, a brutalist icon born from loss, ambition, and one woman’s uncompromising vision.

When Užice’s postwar hotel was demolished in the 1970s, the city’s pulse faltered. Visitors dwindled; the central square grew quiet. The Communist Party demanded a replacement that would echo Yugoslavia’s aspirational futurism—a structure to lure tourists back to the nearby Zlatibor mountains, where alpine winds whistled through ski resorts. Enter Kana Radević, a Montenegrin architect whose work defied the era’s gendered confines. Her winning competition design? A vertical fortress stripped of ornament, its 15 floors clad in raw concrete, its windows slicing upward in narrow bands like streaks of rocket exhaust.

Kana’s genius lay in her manipulation of scale. By clustering the hotel’s 214 windows into vertical strips, she stretched its silhouette optically, making the tower appear to levitate. The concrete façade, poured in situ during the late 1970s construction, bore the gritty texture of its era—unapologetic, industrial. Yet the base, a two-story podium anchored by a cantilevered entrance, softened the ascent, as if the building were both rooted and ready to soar. Locals whispered that Kana had modeled it after a V-2 rocket, a nod to Užice’s WWII partisan resistance. The truth was simpler: her design weaponized hope.

Forty-three years later, Hotel Zlatibor remains polarizing yet beloved. Its brutalist shell has weathered Balkan storms and the fickleness of taste. Skiiers still pile into its 127 rooms, their boots tracking Zlatibor’s snow into the lobby. Critics label it a “period piece,” but its resilience is undeniable: the concrete walls, though stained by time, have outlived Yugoslavia itself.

For Užice’s youth, it’s a canvas. Graffiti artists tag its base; Instagrammers stalk its rooftop for panoramas of the Djetinja River. Kana, who died in 2000, never saw the hotel enter the digital age, but her rocket still hums with potential. On foggy mornings, when the upper floors vanish into mist, it seems to hover—a monument to the day a city dared to build its way out of grief, one concrete floor at a time.