Slavsko Brezovski near department store he designed in 1956. (Nevena Brezoska)

Architectural writers have had a field day criticizing Skopje for its classical makeover. Costly and often sloppy in the embellishment of Macedonia’s capital city, the new buildings feature a lot more enthusiasm than canonical scholarship. But the work is being done at the expense of the city’s modernist experiment following a 1963 quake. Under the post-communist government’s classical revival, façades in some cases literally cover up the Brutalism of the past. A third grader can see that whatever its flaws, the work done under a program known as Skopje 2014, announced in 2010, is more beautiful and engaging than what it displaces. So the modernists are heaving their brickbats with a vengeance.

Reader Russell Jenkins sent me “Architects of Modernist Skopje Decry Retrograde Model,” by Bojan Blazhevski, who wrote it for the Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence. So for its manifold absurdities I blame the writer, who should know better, more than the poor sods whom he interviewed – mostly aging modernists who worked long ago for the communist government of Yugoslavia and are now watching their life work slide into oblivion. That it is deserved merely makes them crankier.

For example, Blazhevski interviews Slavko Brezoski, the architect pictured in the photo above, one of whose buildings, erected in 1960 before the quake, is now being covered over with a new façade. The journalist writes:

It is one of dozens of buildings hidden or about to be hidden behind neo-classical facades and hollow colonnades in a radical makeover of the city called Skopje 2014, designed to resurrect antiquity and burnish a sense of national identity based on Macedonia’s claim to Alexander the Great. Now 94 years old, it pains Brezoski to see what has become of his work, worse still, he says, because he never gave his consent.

Consent!? When has it ever been the practice of developers or property owners (say, the government) to get consent from an architect to alter or demolish a building? What about the building that was there before Brezoski waltzed onto the Skopje stage? Was its designer, let alone its owner, asked for his “consent”? Hardly likely, with Josip Braz Tito in charge.

Another building being refaçaded under Skopje 2014 is what amounts to the center of government for the province Macedonia once was as part of Yugoslavia. It was built in 1971. Vladimir Kulic, a co-curator of an exhibit on Yugoslavian modernism scheduled to open at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2018, had some tart remarks for Blazhevski about its proposed new classical façades:

It is deeply ironic that a building that articulated a modern Macedonian identity through inspiration from local vernacular architecture was dressed up in a laughably illiterate version of international classicism precisely in an attempt to forge an alleged “Macedonianness.”