Revealing the Underground

Abstract

Skopje has developed through a series of erasures and periods of rebuilding, each time with an aim to establish a new order. Conversely, the common culture can be best recognized in self organized commercial spaces in the city, which emerge from activities taking place and forming the physical. The city centre is fragmented in pieces of imposed developments of different historical periods. Despite being a very culturally and administratively charged site, the Mother Theresa square represents one of these undefined, uncomfortable spaces, left in-between disparate unfinished traces. The question becomes how to mediate between the surrounding highly prescriptive buildings, by making a space which can become used and appreciated for its embedded openness. By being unfinished, the traces offer an opportunity for reconfiguration, therefore parts of functions are taken from the existing buildings into the in-between, such as archives, exhibition spaces containing usually unavailable media from cultural buildings, rehearsing and performance spaces. From the tension of encounter, a dialogue can happen between the disparates, forming a smooth field of interaction. The intervention happens in the existing underground garage below the square for its inherent freedom from political imagery and hierarchies of the above ground, offering an unstaped potential. The rigidity of the existing building is softened by establishing a dialogue between the existing and the new, and making a permeable space, investigated through articulation of the relations between public and private, dynamic and static spaces, interior and exterior, light and shadow.