A Review on the Occasion of the XXII Biennial of Contemporary Macedonian Architecture – BIMAS 2025
Thirteen houses, fourteen residential buildings, two kindergartens, two hotels, three mixed-use buildings, an administration, a bank, an academic center, a commercial building, an intervention in public space … this is a two-year production exhibited at the XXII Biennial of Contemporary Architecture in Macedonia BIMAS 2025. BIMAS has a dual character, to present the recent cross-section of architecture, but also to build on the chronology of the works and the people of Macedonian architecture. It is precisely this duality that gives the character of this exhibition, opened as a gathering of diversity, a kind of architecture of truth.
The term vérité, borrowed from the movement cinéma vérité, is used here as a critical framework through which we read the current architectural scene presented at the XXII edition of the Biennial of Contemporary Macedonian Architecture. what cinéma vérité represents in the art of filmmaking – a direct, unfiltered, documented view of reality – is transformed here into architectural vérité: a testimony to what kind of architecture is actually being designed and realized in Macedonia today. Not the idealized, arbitrarily selected image, but the one that really exists – with all its contradictions, indecisions, ambitions, compromises and moves of resistance.
BIMAS, as a traditional event with open applications, represents a documentary expression of the current architectural production. In that sense, this Biennale does not only offer a curated exhibition with the “best” of architecture, but also a cross-section, layer by layer, through which one can perceive the complex state of the profession – as a system and as a culture.
A total of 149 works have been submitted to this, twenty-second edition: 76 projects, 10 competition works, 41 realizations, 16 interiors and 6 urban projects. That number is more than indicative. It speaks about the volume of production, but even more about the priorities – those of the designers, those of the investors, and those of the institutions that approve and enable these projects.
What is being designed and what is being built?
The typological structure of the exhibited works shows a pronounced imbalance: residential architecture dominates with over 60% of the works – 35 single-family and 9 multi-family buildings in the projects category, and 13 single-family and 11 multi-family buildings in the realizations category. This dominance reflects the reality: architectural production in Macedonia is above all a reaction to the private market, to individual demands and to the interest of construction capital. Hotels (9 projects, 2 realizations) and mixed commercial typologies are a logical continuation of that trend.
On the other hand, what is absent is even more striking: only two projects for educational institutions (which are not part of the mainstream of educational activity, but a support for academic work), two kindergartens, one agricultural warehouse, three public space projects, one bridge intervention, and most worryingly, the absence of basic public functions such as new health facilities, student dormitories, nursing homes, more systematic articulations of public space. This is symptomatic not only of architecture, but of the broader social context – where the state and municipalities retreat, architecture becomes a tool of capital.
Where is it designed and built?
The geographical distribution of the works reveals a renewed concentration in Skopje – 71 submitted works, which means almost half of the total offer. Struga, Tetovo, Bitola, Mavrovo, and several villages and smaller settlements follow – Bardovci, Chucher Sandevo, labunishta, velestovo, Nizepole, Murtino… Although these are dispersed phenomena, they carry significance: architecture is gradually starting to appear outside the central urban cores. However, the essential imbalance remains: there is no territorial strategy, but only point reactions to individual orders.
What kind of architecture is offered?
Modernism of free recomposition of elements, fragments and syntax of the modernist tradition, as a kind of free style modernism. Of course, this phenomenon has both critical and positive reflections. In a large part of the works, one can see that current, that flux of recognizable images of architectural representation, frames, assemblies, materials, textures, colors – a kind of global Instagram modernism. So if on the one hand we have a certain cultivation of the display, on the other hand a reduction to its surface effects.
The formal and stylistic language of the works is mostly hybrid – a mixture of modernist repertoire with postmodern freedom. The objects are often designed as “effective” forms, adapted for digital presentation – visualizations that want to look good rather than be good architectural solutions. Architecture is treated as a shell, an envelope, a packaging. It lacks contextuality, typological depth, or at least a pronounced position towards public space.
But on the margins of that image, works that speak differently appear. There are projects that try to articulate new forms, new relationships with the terrain, with the user, with the material. There are attempts at geometric innovation, at programmatic fluidity, at a renewed sense of the small undertaking. There are also works that return architecture to rationality, that try to build with measure, with economy of means and expression.
Such examples can be recognized in the projects of younger or more sensitive studios and architects: Arhitektura Nova, K87a, Proxy, Parameter, BAM, Tome and vasil Timov, violeta Bakalchev, Zorica Blazevska, gordan Petrov and Aleksandar Petanovski, Sasha Tasic, dimitar Papasterievski, Jone Ilkovski and others. It is not about style, but about position – architecture that is not afraid to be both quiet and emphasized, precise and thoughtful, limited but significant. Architecture that does not want to dominate, but to live.
Possible directions
If this Biennale is read as a mirror, then the image it reflects is neither black and white nor spectacular. It is complex, fragmented, ambivalent.
On the one hand, one sees real production – as it is: mostly reactive, dependent on the market, with minimal engagement with the public interest. On the other hand, there are sparks of possibility, of exploration, of intelligent and sensitive architecture developing on the margins.
It is precisely outside the mainstream – be it geographically, typologically, or conceptually – that the potential for an authentic, contemporary architectural expression emerges. It does not come from the center, it is not institutionally authorized, but is practical, analytical and self-aware. Architecture that does not pretend to have meaning, but creates it.
Violeta and Minas Bakalchev
Selectors of BIMAS XXII
