Svetlana Kana Radević was born in Cetinje, Montenegro, in 1937. After finishing primary school in her native town, she moved to Podgorica to attend high school. In 1955 Radević began studying architecture in Yugoslavia’s capital Belgrade. Upon graduation, Radević returned to Podgorica to start her professional career. In the Montenegrin capital, she was employed by the design and planning company Invest-engineering (1963-1974), combining her work at the state institution with running her private design studio.

In the first year of her architectural practice, in 1964, Radević won in a competition for the project for the Hotel “Podgorica”. Her design of the Hotel “Podgorica” represented an unprecedented success. Winning the Republican and Federal “Borba” Prize for Architecture at the age of 31, the most prestigious prize in socialist Yugoslavia, she became the youngest laureate, the only female, and the only Montenegrin architect to win the Federal Borba Prize.

In the same year Radević developed two new facilities in 1968: a Bus Terminal Station in Podgorica and a residential and commercial building in the coastal village of Petrovac. Also, she established a fruitful collaboration with the mountain town of Mojkovac which culminated with the construction of the Hotel “Mojkovac” (1974).

At the beginning of the 1970s, Radević traveled to the USA on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania in Louis Kahn’s Class (1972-73). Later, she continued her professional training and engagement in Paris (CSTB), Salzburg, Moscow, and Japan, in the Kishō Kurokawa’s atelier.

Despite her prolonged stays abroad, Radević was constantly present on the Montenegrin and Yugoslav architectural scene by participating in design competitions. In the late 1970s she added to her oeuvre some remarkable works such as the Monument to the Fallen Soldiers of the Lješanska nahija region at Barutana (1976–1980), or the Hotel “Zlatibor” in Užice (Serbia), completed in 1981.

In the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Radević proceeded to design civic spaces such as the Kindergarten at Cetinje (1988) and the Lexicographic Institute in Podgorica (1984–1989). In this period of creative activity, Radević worked with her younger sister, architect Ljiljana Lili Radević, and an example of that cooperation is the Business Centre “Kruševac” (1991) in Podgorica.

Radević was a regular member of the Doclean Academy of Sciences and Arts (DASA) as the first female member in Montenegro, and a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Science, elected in 1994, at the same time as Kenzo Tange. She was also the first vice-president of the independent cultural institution Matica Crnogorska, a member of the Montenegrin PEN Centre, and a member of UNESCO (AIA).

Radević’s designs were showcased in the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980”, held in New York’s MoMA 2018-2019. In 2021, an exhibition devoted to Kana’s work, curated by Anna Kats and Dijana Vučinić, was on view as a collateral event at the XVII Biennale Architettura in Venice.

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