Multi-fold Perspectives on Skopje’s Reconstruction. Megastructures, Infrastructures, and Emergency Housing

Reviewing and cross-checking available literature against articles published in international and Yugoslav journals, this paper highlights the diverging aspects of Skopje´s reconstruction after the earthquake of 26 July 1963, an unmatchable case study on the architectural and town planning debate of the mid-sixties. While the master plan proceeded in forced stages, pondering alternative scenarios, new emergency neighbourhoods were expanding daily along the main arterial roads. The historic centre was considered a vital part of Skopje, yet the future of its architectural expression — according to the entries of the 1965 competition — remained entangled in the infrastructural layout. Considering the complexity of all these conditions (and the strain of time), the notion of context takes on a plurality of meanings: the city of Skopje, having been grafted onto place geography, but periodically reshaped by tumultuous settlement processes; the 150,000 inhabitants that suddenly became homeless; professionals from the town planning institutes of Tito's Yugoslavia, and experts from international organisations: seismologists, hydraulic engineers, economists, sociologists, as well as town planners and architects from different backgrounds. The subsequent planning documents highlighted some fundamental nodes, such as the physical features of the Skopska Kotlina (Skopje basin) where a major national road junction was then under construction, defining urban growth and productive articulation. Using the competition for the city centre as a starting point, we shall consider the gigantism of most architectural projects against the technicalities of town planning allied to emergency interventions, which opened the way to future substitutions and densification. A review of the projects submitted to the 1965 competition, in fact, clearly shows the contrast between these visionary proposals and the reality of the problems at hand. The following paragraphs dwell on the different nature of the above-mentioned problems (in the first place, settlement congestion, severe even before the earthquake), the management of which could not be separated from some major works under way, such as the road junction that would return Skopje to its strategic role in the Balkans. The deployment of forces was such that the debate on the future city drew on very different international expertise. While architects’ mega-structures for "the heart of the city" remained largely on paper, it was preferred to invest in the networks on which the settlement to come depended. Somehow paradoxically. neighborhoods built in emergency proved organic to these networks, precisely because of their precariousness that would guarantee greater degrees of freedom in the years to come.