Dragan Krstevski: the politics of architecture & the art you can’t escape

This is the first installment in a series dedicated to better understanding the oft-maligned architectural style so prevalent across Skopje, North Macedonia – also known as “the European capital of Brutalism.” Launched on the 57th anniversary of the earthquake that led to Skopje’s reconstruction, we sat down with the creators who best understand the city’s ethos and complexion. Read the second interview in the series here.

Skopje is an urban wonderland for enthusiasts of cosmic concrete architecture. With a population of just over half a million, the capital of North Macedonia would be considered a small one by most standards. But despite its modest size, it contains more Brutalist architecture than any other comparable city in the world and boasts an astonishing and concentrated array of Modernist edifices that are directly accessible, with many located in the city center itself.

So how did so much Brutalism end up here, and what lessons can be drawn from the rapid stylistic evolution of North Macedonia’s anomalous urban hub? We sat down with native Skopjean Dragan Krstevski, now a London-based architect, TEDx speaker, co-founder of architectural NGO First Archi Brigade, and author of a recently published work detailing the Skopje city plan, to uncover how this unassuming corner of the Balkans earned the moniker “the European capital of Brutalism.” We begin this particular tale of transformation with the unexpected: a tragedy that rewrote the city and its people.

“My grandparents were from Skopje. Their house was demolished that day,” Dragan recounts. They were lucky to survive.

In the early morning of July 26, 1963, a shallow-depth earthquake struck the capital of then-Yugoslavia’s southern republic of Macedonia. The ensuing destruction killed over 1,000 people, left more than 200,000 homeless, and razed 80% of the city. As the extent of the damage became visible, authorities determined that much of Skopje was beyond repair. Some neighborhoods were erased altogether, never to be rebuilt. Dragan’s grandmother later recalled with nostalgia the city’s Jewish Quarter, of which only one small building corner remains today.

In 1965, the UN held a limited competition for the city’s reconstruction, and an urban plan submitted by Japanese Modernist architect Kenzō Tange won 60% of the vote, to be developed in collaboration with a team of Yugoslav architects. The Master Plan proposal, which contains elements inspired by Le Corbusier’s notion of the city as a machine, was based on two metaphorical concepts: the “City Gate” and the “City Wall,” and is the topic of Dragan’s debut publication. The plan brought together infrastructure, monumental scale in a three-dimensional system and sophisticated details. Tange’s vision for Skopje also ushered in an era of robust architectural activity that saw stark and geometric Brutalist structures erected across the city, employing the “modern materials” of exposed concrete, reinforced brick, steel and glass.

“Personally, I love Brutalism and modern architecture,” Dragan admits. Having determined by age eight that he wanted to be an architect, he doesn’t discount the possibility that growing up surrounded by Modernist architecture may have informed his gravitation towards the field. “I think it’s a very important style because it clears architecture from unnecessary decoration and it proves how simple forms and functional designs can create physically beautiful buildings.”

The opinion is a controversial one. Aesthetics were never the primary goal of this modular, utilitarian style, and Brutalism typically elicits a strong reaction of either love or revulsion. But putting taste aside, Dragan maintains that it’s important to view the buildings within the context of the era that gave birth to them. “Nowadays, we see buildings which are fully glass, but concrete was quite popular at that time. The style that we had in Skopje after the earthquake, that was the first time in history when Macedonia and that part of the Balkans was in line with world trends. As much as the earthquake was a devastating thing for the city – there was nothing positive about it – it also brought us many years forward and gave us the opportunity to progress, to design a city which was very close to what was happening elsewhere in the world,” he says.

In his current position as an architect with Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Dragan is part of the team re-designing one of London’s government buildings – he jokes that he is probably the first Macedonian to ever do so. The work is a testament to the reality that urban structures, though functional, are never apolitical and, to a further extent, never free of the zeitgeist – even when they long to be.

“When I talk about modern architecture in Skopje, I always refer to it as Modernist or Brutalist because a lot of people refer to it as communist, which is completely wrong. That was the political situation in the country at the time. But the architect who designed the Master Plan had nothing to do with communism in Yugoslavia. Kenzō Tange was not communist. I think that for many people who are not big fans of Brutalist architecture, it’s mainly because they’re referencing and recalling the communist system.”

The lingering political connotation of the era, now so often associated with the distinctive style of the city’s architecture, is not the only stumbling block for those who experience Brutalist buildings.

“Some of the dislike towards these buildings in Macedonia is also because they’re old and they’re not kept very well. The company where I work now in London, we did the redevelopment and updating of the Barbican building. If you see how much they’re investing in keeping the building looking nice even though it was built in the seventies, it’s impressive how people can still relate to it. Because it has been maintained, it’s become an icon, a status symbol. It’s a motif printed on clothes and objects. But if you let the buildings slide, like the Goce Delčev student dormitory in Skopje, whatever style they are, they’re going to be ugly after some time. You would never print that building on a posh dress.” (He does, however, design t-shirts emblazoned with a graphic rendering of Tange’s Master Plan through his brand, Architectt.)

It’s not that the city didn’t have the resources to maintain these historical buildings, alternately regarded as lovely monoliths or decaying eyesores, depending on who you talk to. Rather, in 2010 the then-ruling nationalist party VMRO-DPMNE announced a new urban plan, known as Skopje 2014, with the official purpose of giving the capital a more “classical” appeal – to the tune of over $700 million. As a nation-building endeavor, the project hastily erected government buildings, museums, and monuments of ancient historical figures, drawing criticism for its apparent intent to impose an artificial narrative of Macedonian national identity. The government stated its aim to create a more “metropolitan atmosphere” to counter the plainer Modernist aesthetic.

Up went ornate and cheaply constructed Neoclassical and Baroque edifices, despite the fact that neither style ever existed in Skopje, even prior to 1963. Due to the speed and poor quality of materials with which these constructions were built, many have already fallen into disrepair, suffering discoloration and water damage. In a city that already bears the marks of so many bygone eras and every imaginable style of architecture from the last two millennia, the latest layer is often a source of confusion for tourists and visitors.

Imagine: an ancient fortress dating back to the sixth century, built during the reign of Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great, overlooks the city center and the winding Vardar River below, and faces Europe’s largest cross, perched atop the inner city mountain just across the valley. On one side of the river lies the lively and charming Old Bazaar neighborhood, a remnant from Ottoman domination of the region and one of the oldest marketplaces in the Balkans. Cross the 700-year-old Stone Bridge, built on top of much older Roman foundations, to reach the ever-bustling city square and strollable streets lined with packed cafes before arriving at the ruins of the old train station, now the City Museum, where the outward-facing clock is still frozen at 5:17am – the moment the earthquake struck in 1963. The heart of Skopje is nothing if not a palimpsest.

“The Skopje 2014 project…it went over the line. It extended to every possible place in the city. I’ve taken at least 30 or 40 people from London to visit Skopje – I organized an architectural tour for my colleagues from the firm where I used to work. It was very interesting how they perceived it, because I got questions like, ‘Is the fortress old or new?’ People couldn’t tell. It completely destroys the idea that ‘we’re creating identity’ because what we’re really doing is confusing it. The Neoclassical buildings are intended to look old even though they’re new, but they’re falling apart so now they look old for the wrong reasons. I always tell people, if something looks old, it’s probably quite recently built.”

“I always say architecture is art. But it’s different from the other arts because it’s an art that you need to be able to use. That has to be the priority.”

Architecture shapes the landscape of our lives, the forms and horizons our eyes learn to encounter, to expect, every day. Dragan calls it “the only art you cannot escape.” And there’s a sense in which the imposition of a new cityscape – whatever the reason – is a sort of violence inflicted on inhabitants. In the case of the events of 1963, a literal violence transpired, which Dragan feels was compounded by the disorientation brought about when people who had spent their entire lives in Skopje woke up in 1970 to new Modernist surroundings. The experience repeated itself yet again in the run-up to Skopje 2014.

“What happened after the earthquake is very comparable to what happened in 2014,” Dragan explains. “The main difference is that one event was a natural disaster. The other was a people’s disaster. In the sixties, the [city planners] basically killed the collective memory of those who lived in Skopje who survived the earthquake. All of a sudden in five years, they got new architecture, and the same goes for us now; it takes several years to get used to that and to realize, ‘this is our city now.’ The same thing happened 40 years later. I think that’s the main issue: that we never learn from our mistakes.”

Despite his disapproval of the city’s latest changes, however, he believes that undoing them sets a dangerous precedent.

“I think the beauty of a city is when you have these layers, when your grandparents can tell you what their favorite part of the city was, when you have your own muscle memory of the city, when your children have muscle memory of the city. If we start replacing façades with every generation coming, then that is not the city anymore. That’s just a postcard from some temporary reality.”

Here in 2020, Skopje remains a fascinating canvas where history, politics, and art play out, leaving their mark before a new image is superimposed, over and over again. Dragan puts it eloquently in his book: “Architecture is the first thing that one notices about a city. If the people are the soul, the architecture is the body of the city, the template of the city’s soul. […] It has to be in harmony with its citizens and serve them, while at the same time giving the city a unique identity.”

The city as a body, a physical manifestation of a more complex reality, is an apt analogy for Skopje: just as an injured body would be rehabilitated after a disaster, Kenzō Tange’s reconstruction of the city sought to restore the city’s vitality and humanism. His plan, though unfinished today, conveyed meaning beyond the level of physical form – a symbolic approach that he had begun to explore in his Tokyo Bay project, but which remained undeveloped until Skopje. The springboard: his symbolic concepts of the city “gate” (a literal gateway structure where all traffic forms converged) and “wall” (a line of apartment buildings surrounding the center), two programmatic features as well as metaphors for his proposed urban form.

“We forget how that structure defines the city, especially because it was built in the seventies and eighties. While at that time in Berlin there was a wall that was dividing the city, in Skopje we were building a wall that was filled with people right in the center. Not a wall of businesses or offices; a wall of people. [Kenzō Tange] wanted to show that those who lost their homes in the earthquake are the ones who are now defining the city center. That’s a really significant ideology for a structure, and it also takes inspiration from the shape of the fortress. But because it was interpreted in the years afterwards as ‘communist’ architecture, it never got a fair judgment from people.”

The Master Plan offers a powerful conception of, and even guidance for, both the physical and emotional experience of city-dwelling, reinforcing the notion that by building a place to live, an outlook for the future can be built as well. In many ways, the Yugoslavian-era plan created a formula for Skopje 2014: manufacture a national consciousness by manufacturing an urban one.

But perhaps neither approach to urban design has gotten a fair shake – perhaps Skopje, past and present, is a living lesson in how a vision for urbanity can be marred by political ideology, and why it’s critical for urban spaces to prioritize people over politics.

“When I talk about architecture in Skopje people always ask me, ‘What would you do if you had the power during Skopje 2014?’ That’s the question I hate the most,” Dragan says, “because I struggle to find the answer. I do not like the new Baroque and Neoclassical buildings. I don’t relate to them. They do not show exceptional architecture. You can see they were done very cheaply. If you go inside, the space layout is extremely questionable. If [these] buildings create our identity, it’s a really bad one…but I don’t think we should complete the Master Plan either. It can be revisited…we shouldn’t completely abolish the original idea, however it needs to be adapted to today’s world.

“I think in modern architecture, in the Brutalist times, the buildings were breathing, they needed breathing space around them. Nowadays, the concept of cities is very different. I always say architecture is art. But it’s different from the other arts because it’s an art that you need to be able to use. That has to be the priority.”

Whatever its detractors may say, Brutalism strongly informs Skopje’s aesthetic experience, and its presence throughout the heart of the city lends it an accessibility – a neighborliness. For those who still wouldn’t classify themselves as fans of the style, Dragan believes it’s never too late for preferences to evolve.

“Modernist architecture is not a style that’s made to be loved by everyone…It’s harder to do good architecture with simple forms and one or two types of material than it is with a lot of decoration. But the modern style was a very good bridge between contemporary architecture and what we have today: quite simple forms but the use of more materials and a different approach to the space.

“We have a saying in Macedonian that I don’t think exists in other languages. Za vkusovi ne se razprava. It’s something like, ‘you do not discuss tastes,’ you can’t argue about taste because all of us have a different and subjective one. But I think you educate your taste. You’re not born with just one sensibility that lasts your whole life. People don’t dress the same when they’re 20, 30 and 40. They acquire a different taste. I think it’s the same with architecture, with Brutalism. A lot of architects love Brutalism because we learn about it and we understand the styles, how they’re drawn, we understand how difficult it is to design a building like that. But other people, people who are not architects, can also learn to love it.”

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With special thanks to Macedonian graphic designer Zoki Cardula, creator of the Brutalism illustrations featured in this article. More of his projects can be seen here.