Gallery Tour Part 1: Yane Calovski, Skopje Master Plan

Yane Calovski's project, Master Plan, also exhibited at Manifesta 7, consists of a series of 66 drawings in conjunction with video that incorporates the recently resurfaced winning plan for the city of Skopje, Macedonia as it was laid out by Kenzo Tange Associates in 1965.

On July 26th, 1963 a devastating earthquake hit Skopje, destroying the majority of the city. The United Nations Development Fund invited Tange, along with a group of seven other local and international architects and studios, to submit proposals for a new urban plan. Tange's was chosen out of the group for its extreme attention to detail, incorporation of the city's existing topography, and innovative composition for the city center.

The mid 60's in the former Yugoslavia was a period in which the specific model of idealism employed in the region (General Tito's) was particularly prosperous, both socially and politically. Calovski writes, "the skopje urban plan project was a chance for the international community to become aware of the distinctiveness of the Macedonian national identity and especially of Skopje, 'a functioning urban organism that was for the moment dead on its feet.'"


Internally the project was as well an opportunity for Macedonians to redefine their own perception of their national identity in terms of the use of and relationship to public and private space, history, modernity, as well as their potential ideological future after the destruction of their capitol city and cultural axis. Intended to be implemented in stages, Tange's plan was continuously altered and manipulated by local officials, planners and architects, over the years of its development following the competition and eventually disappeared completely. The reasons for this disappearance have been sought after by art and architectural historians, urban planners, sociologists, politicians and historians for decades to no avail. Skopje's further development became a mishmash of political turmoil and inefficient decision making, leading the city to turn out a proverbial Soviet Frankenstein, on the whole unremarkable. Despite Kenzo Tange's efforts to transform Skopje into the brilliant oasis of idealism that it had the potential to become, Calovski writes, "the average citizen of Skopje could still be heard blaming that “Japanese” driven by ambition who had mistaken a city for a video game."















Yane Calovski's research into the project involved digging through various municipal archives in Skopje to find every scrap of information regarding the project, its development and its eventual dismissal. Calovski poses questions of what went wrong and when and how it happened to these archives as well as to the few remaining citizens of Skopje who were directly involved in the project. He studied the model intimately, deconstructing it piece by piece. Calovski also incorporated documentation from the development of the project of the architects working in their studio as well as images from the unveiling of the model into the final project (some of which are currently on display at ZAK BRANICKA).


Master Plan simultaneously explores a fascinating and internationally resonant historical event and engages an interesting approach to the use of archival materials and the process of sifting through them. Calovski employed similar tactics for his project, Oskar Hansen's MoMA, in which he presented an advertising campaign for a lecture and exhibition series at a museum, designed by the Polish architect Oskar Hansen for Skopje also after the 1963 earthquake, that was as well never built. Both projects result in attempted "reconstructions" in varying mediums of that which never existed physically but was entirely tangible ideologically. This dichotomy is something that can potentially be extended to describe life in Skopje in the mid 60's under Tito more generally.