His father, Budislav Cvijanović, was a medical doctor and, during the Regency of the 1930s, a government ministerial advisor.

After a short while, the family emigrated to the United States, where he secured the Tolstoy Foundation’s scholarship to study architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Shortly after graduating from Harvard, Cvijanović joined The Architects Collaborative (TAC),[3] an architectural partnership founded by Walter Gropius and seven younger partners.

[2][1] Cvijanović spoke several languages, including Russian, Italian, French and German.

After the demise of The Architects Collaborative, Cvijanović continued to work internationally (Kuwait, Singapore, Berlin) and in the USA.