Slumbering Concrete
9.5Returning SeriesDocumentary

Slumbering Concrete

Documentary series "Slumbering Concrete" erects its narrative around modern architecture in Croatia and regions of the former Yugoslavia - an area distinguished by large number of vacated and ruinous buildings from 20th century that are of immense architectural significance. The series is composed of 4 thematic chapters, of which the first is dedicated to architecture of tourism purposes, second to monuments and commemorative buildings, third to post-industrial and post-military landscapes and fourth to great ambitions of unfinished modernizations.

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4. A City That Was Too Modern

A City That Was Too Modern
0.0May 19, 2019 · 49 min

After the catastrophic earthquake in 1963, Skopje became a global demonstration city of the future. UN hired international experts to participate in its reconstruction, the central figure being the Japanese avant-garde architect Kenzo Tange who designed the new center using the principles of the metabolism – its first application outside Japan. In its bid to become city of the future, Skopje anticipated some of the concepts that are only being realized today, but the ambitious idea was only partially realized. The bare brutalist architecture of unplastered concrete, at the same time archaic and futuristic, does not compromise, but tries to build a new world – but was it just a megalomaniacal project that was impossible to live in? In the episode, we also touch on the current Macedonian political nomenclature in their endeavor to rewrite history through construction – authentic modernism is replaced by faux Baroque and monumental memorials.