The Yugoslav Skopje: Building the brutalist city, 1970–1990

On 26 July 1963, a devastating earthquake struck the Yugoslav city of Skopje. In the following decades, Skopje was rebuilt under the patronage of the United Nations and the Yugoslav government, a radical urban reconstruction project in the delicate game of Cold War politics. Still, the contemporary discourse on the reconstruction of Skopje almost exclusively focuses on the role of the international community and the world's renowned architects: the United Nations and Kenzo Tange, in particular. However, rebuilding the North Macedonian capital after the earthquake took a different turn: the UN funded the creation of plans for the reconstruction of the city, and its experts and architects departed in the late 1960s.

The analysis of the rebuilding of the Macedonian capital by local and Yugoslav architects exists on the scholarly periphery of Cold War architecture and urban planning. To expand this lacking discourse, this chapter examines the 20-year period of the making of brutalist Skopje, 1970–1990. The construction of Skopje in the latter decades of the Cold War exemplifies the creation of a unique brutalist city embedded in an international blueprint of modernist urban planning: the reconstruction was facilitated by the local and national know-how and the transfers of knowledge that came from the UN-sponsored fellowships and the global collaborations established by Yugoslavs.