Unit 8
Skopje: What’s next?
Armor Gutierrez Rivas, Rosa Rogina
Unit 8 perceives architecture as a social and political practice, and therefore promotes mobilisation of architectural thinking and making as a tool to engage with current matters of concern, both local and global. It explores how can architectural design process be expanded beyond its conventional role and be utilised as a tool for a wider social, economic and cultural change. The unit looks more closely into territories of spatial and/or social tension and attempts to unpack and address these complex contemporary conditions. By balancing in between identified real-world context and radical imagination, the students in Unit 8 are encouraged to use the identified tension as a main driver for their design proposal. This year students in Unit 8 are investigating a new typology of youth club for Skopje, North Macedonia, that examines the role of the youth in modern public life and its potential to challenge some of the current local and/or global matters of concern. By designing schemes that promote sustainable ways of building and living, students in unit 8 are asked to explore what architecture for and by a new generation can be, who Skopje is for and what its future hold. Skopje is a city of many spatial, social, political and environmental paradoxes. While immensely suffering from the collapse of Yugoslavia, public sector corruption, highest pollution levels amongst European capitals cities and high unemployment rates, the city is currently experiencing a high peak of the government-funded construction boom resulting
SKOPJE, NORTH MACEDONIA
in an overflow of neo-classical and neo-baroque large statues, fountains, decorative bridges and false facades. Failures in modern politics that are being directly transmitted through architecture alien to local culture, people and their socio-economic status, have led local people to be increasingly detached from their urban surroundings. If the challenges that Skopje poses to future generations are directly impacted by the entanglement of local politics and built environment, can the local youth instead of surrendering to the overall feeling of disillusion use architecture as driver for a social, political and environmental change? By learning from and building upon the social model of a Yugoslavian youth club, unit 8 critically investigates and proposes a new institutional typology for Macedonian youth. While designing spaces for debate, collaboration and collective management of shared resources, students in unit 8 are actively encouraged to explore the local vernacular in terms of typology, construction methodology and materiality. By using architecture as a form of resistance, this year’s projects will serve as a testing ground for the local youth to define how does a more democratic and sustainable future for Skopje look like.
