When I first read the phrase “the space of socialist modernism,” I could not but think that its oxymoronic structure is completely applicable for Skopje’s urban development. Skopje, similarly to Foucault’s renowned definition of the space of the mirror, is both utopic and heterotopic (i). It has been imagined as a fantasy, as a reflection of an ideal modernist beauty that in reality turned into a strange obscure beast.
Skopje’s centre has been developed from scratch after 1963, when it was in large extent destroyed by a catastrophic earthquake. The devastation led to an enthusiastic dream for rebuilding the city centre through an international contest. The Japanese modernist architect Kenzo Tange won the 1965 internationally UN-financed contest that was a result of the unprecedented world-wide solidarity. He thus designed the Master Plan for reconstruction of earthquake-stricken Skopje.
Tange imagined a dramatic “City Wall” that as a continuous medieval fort-like housing block re-defined Skopje’s existing city center, but with little to engage with the already existing city structures. In fact, it did resemble the shape of the real remains of the ruin of the medieval wall; only that what was once imagined only as a form of protection from the enemy and a clear division in outside and inside of the city, it now collapsed into an all embracing and closed structure that left outside its own citizens. The “City Gate” blocks of high tower still define the pedestrian gateway to Skopje’s city centre, as if the centre is the only urban element that counts.
For his both praised and criticised project, Tange was highly influenced by Le Corbusier’s central planning and his autocratic top-down approach. However, the proposed plan has never been realised thoroughly: moreover, it was realised as a draft that left many gaps and undefined aesthetical shapes and functions of the spaces. Today there are some empty and undeveloped spaces in the city centre that make even more evident the social gaps and conflicts in the Macedonian society. The predominant architectural difference between the left and right bank of the river Vardar is emphasised by the different ethnic and religious background of the majority inhabitants. Thus, it underlines the elitist monstrosity of the uncritical application of the international modernism in the underdeveloped city such was pre-earthquake Skopje (ii).
The conceptual tension reverberating from the phrase “socialist modernism” results from the apparent contrast between the terms “socialist realism” and “modernism”. Even though modernism brought many different concepts into being, one of its premises, at least in art, prevailed – its reversal of the hierarchies of representation that ended up as anti-representative (iii). This “iconoclasm” is exactly in opposition to the focus on the “real” in “socialist realism”. However, it should not be forgotten that modernism had its avant-garde component that connected the aesthetic to the political, the singular to the communitarian. Unfortunately, within the architectural programmatic manifestos such as the ones proclaimed by Le Corbusier and Tange the aesthetisation of the political often led towards inevitable alienation. It also resulted with re-enforcement of the difference between political, social and cultural elites living within “City Wall,” and the socially and ethnically marginalised subjects (poor workers, or ethnic minorities) left outside the “City Gate”.

(This text was first published in: Heimat Moderne, Ed.Katia Heinecke and Jan Wnzel, Berlin: jovis Verlag, 2006, E21)

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(i) Michel Foucault. "Of Other Spaces" Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22-27, 20 March 2006 .
(ii) Lydia Merenik. “The Yugoslav Experience or What Happened to Socialist Realism,” Moscow Art Magazine No. 22, 1998, 10 Oct. 2003 . Merenik quotes Marshall Berman’s phrase “A modernism of underdevelopment."
(iii) Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics. New York: Continuum, 2004, 24.