ABSTRACT
Introduction Many buildings erected in Skopje in the fifteen years following Kenzo Tange’s post-1963 earthquake reconstruction masterplan are robust, massive structures and have collectively produced a be´ton brut cityscape.1 Marked against a scene of destruction, their erection, the sheer number of edifices constructed, their raw concrete expression of structure and form and strong visual presence made it distinct from the clean modernist language that had evolved in the Yugoslavian avant-garde and early postwar period. Between Reyner Banham’s 1955 essay and 1966 book on the New Brutalism (the latter subtitled Ethics or Aesthetics?),2 the case for Brutalist architecture had shifted, not least because numerous Brutalist constructions proliferated in developing nations (often disavowed as just bad architecture and cheap construction), but also due to the unique intersections of Fabrications, 2015 Vol. 25, No. 2, 152-175, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2015.1032482 2015 The Journal of the Society of Architectural Australia and New Zealand
parallel international developments. Skopje represents a meeting point between Brutalism, Metabolism and its American parallels, producing an elucidating case for the current interest in, and discourse on, Brutalism. Due to the high standard of their conceptual agenda, design development and standard of execution, Skopje’s Brutalist buildings are a distinctive story of both presence and presentation, providing the empirical landscape for one of Banham’s key principles of New Brutalism on the significance of the image. Points of coincidence between Brutalism, Metabolism and the architecture of Paul Rudolph were occurring in the 1960s through, for example, the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo, the international rise of Kenzo Tange and the distribution of non-European journal publication in the 1960s – notably, Japan Architect. The Skopje case brings these architectural agendas and experiments into direct encounter and an exacting local architectural production in one small city.
