Peter Sägesser | SKOPJE UTOPIA

After a huge earthquake in 1963 the reconstruction of Skopje would become an experimental laboratory for a 1970s utopian socialist vision of urban development. Although Kenzo Tange’s master plan was only realized in rather fragmentary fashion, it certainly paved the way for other visionary projects, such as the Student dormitory and the City Archive, both by Georgi Konstantinovski. Janko Konstantinov created an organic concrete sculpture as the Central Skopje Post Office, while Marko Musić concentrated on the old town’s labyrinth of little lanes and squares in his design for the university building. But the most impressive of all is the Macedonian Opera and Ballet built in 1979. It looks less like a building, more like a mountain range whose slopes cascade down to the Vardar River, reminiscent of the Oslo Opera House by Snøhetta or modern-day buildings by Zaha Hadid. In the act of reinventig Skopje the governing Conservatives are now destroying parts of this unique ensemble.
Peter SÄGESSER (CH) is an architect and social worker. Since he made an internship at a state own office in the communist Budapest during his architecture study at the ETH Zürich (1985 - 1991), Peter Sägesser explores and documents the Post War architecture in Central and Eastern Europe. The results are shown since 2006 on his webpage ostarchitektur.com. Peter Sägesser has an architecture office in Bern and wrote several articles about the architecture in Central and Eastern Europe. He is lecturer for Social Space at the University of Applied Arts, Board Member of the Architekturforum Bern and Member of the Society of Historians of East European, Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture.

[@D100janovski]

its sad that none of the pictures of the miniatures of the city can be found anywhere nor the miniatures themselves, because Tange's creation is just outstanding and if it was made like he imagined it would be very futuristic and beautiful, and as a person who lives in Skopje all his life its very sad and discussing what they did in 2014, as the presenter said "a city plan without a plan"