A Playground for Skopje

Student: Leonie Meisel

Title: A Playground for Skopje: A Tension Between Freedom and Constraints

Semester: 2020 June

Teachers: Jorge Mejia Hernandez, Pierre Jennen, Klaske Havik

This project is represented in the TU Delft 2021 Archiprix preselection.

The graduation project is a playground in and around the former Post Office of Skopje which is composed of three main elements. Firstly, the terrain of the complex is divided into four main fields, which vary from their immediate surroundings towards the city. Furthermore, the element of the bridge, which grows with its tentacles into these different zones, is located on the axis from the city to the river and thus decentralises the existing building. Lastly, the circular Post Office plays the role of the cohesive host of all the elements, bringing with it the factor of time.

More information about the project can be found here.

Skopje appears to be a divided city where the different layers of time negotiate and are represented in its image. One of these layers is that of the 1960s metabolism. This project proposes that the Post Office building, the former public nucleus of communication, be returned to the inhabitants as a common ground that interweaves its urban surroundings.

Following our in-situ research, we concluded that Skopje finds itself in a state of liminality: an in-between state of transition.

The proposal is a bridge that intervenes in the existing architecture and thereby creates a series of transition spaces focusing on encountering elements to create the unexpected. These chance encounters develop an openness through the means of playing.

Based on the analogue design approach of an interplay between freedom and constraint, the ‘player’ moves freely within prescribed limits. By following the spatial sequence, new possibilities that bridge and communicate between previously separated urban spaces appear.

More information about this project can be found here.