Architecture of North Macedonia

The groups of people who have settled or controlled the territory of modern-day North Macedonia have influenced the country in many ways, one of the most visible being architecture.

The earliest example of architectural activity in North Macedonia date from the Neolithic and consist of structures associated with Megalith culture.

[1] Remnants of the architecture from the times of the ancient Macedonian Kingdom are scattered throughout North Macedonia, especially in the south of the former territory of Macedon.

Heraclea Lyncestis, founded in the middle of the 4th century BC, was an important strategical town as it bordered Epirus to the west and the Paeonian kingdoms to the north.

By 1345, King Stefan Dusan of the Serbian Empire had taken over half of the Balkans including the region of Macedonia and declared himself the new Caesar.

Yugoslav architecture became more and more dictated by an increasingly concentrated national authority which sought to establish a unified state identity.

[5] Beginning in the 1920s, Yugoslav architects began to advocate for architectural modernism, viewing the style as the logical extension of progressive national narratives.

[6][7] Immediately following the Second World War, Yugoslavia's brief association with the Eastern Bloc ushered in a short period of socialist realism.

During this period, the governing Communist Party condemned modernism as "bourgeois formalism," a move that caused friction among the nation's pre-war modernist architectural elite.

[7] During this era, modernist architecture came to symbolize the nation's break from the USSR (a notion that later diminished with the growing acceptability of modernism in the Eastern Bloc).

[10] In the late 1950s and early 1960s Brutalism began to garner a following within Yugoslavia, particularly among younger architects, a trend possibly influenced by the 1959 disbandment of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne.

[12] Japanese architect Kenzo Tange played a key role in pushing for brutalism in the city, going so far as to propose a full redesign of Skopje in the style.

Architects increasingly focused on building with reference to the architectural heritage of their individual socialist republics in the form of critical regionalism.

One example is the MRT Center (the national TV broadcast station), rising to 230 ft (70.10 m) (70 m) which was the tallest building in the country until 2013 when the Cevahir Towers were built.