” Architect and Photographer Lorenz Bürgi and architect Charlotte Malterre-Barthes of the urban research platform OMNIBUS take us to Skopje, Macedonia, where they focus on the traces of the partially realized 1963 Master Plan proposed by Kenzo Tange after the destruction of the city by a 6.1 earthquake.” in MAS-CONTEXT ‘VISIBILITY’.

“I know I’ve seen the Master Plan”
Drugstore & Tom Yorke -El President (1998)

The fascination exerted by post-communist places never seems to wear off. In the perspective of recently published photographic works such as Frédéric Chaubin’s Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed, Roman Bezjak’s Socialist Modernism and Jan Kempenaers‘s Spomeniks, or the latest collaborative book of Armin Linke and Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss Socialist Architecture: The Vanishing Act, the photographic work of Lorenz Bürgi on Skopje could, at first glance, illustrate further and not more than- the romantic attraction of decaying post-communist concrete architecture. But Skopje, capital of the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia, bears a different past than other cities behind the Iron Gate and a particular relation to architectural and urban utopias. (…) ”

As a follow-up to a long-lasting interest, OMNIBUS goes back again and again to Skopje, fascinating city where urban design and planning meets informality, heritage and political issues in a most magnifying way.