Nautilus

Born from conversations with locals, production teams, workers, manufacturers, students and photographers, Nautilus is an event space to re-animate a neglected part of Skopje.

Residents and cultural groups in Skopje welcomed an open structure built with the intention of hosting events, talks and gatherings at the banks of the city’s Vardar River. The event space was conceived and realized by a group of architects from the association TEN and a local NGO City Creative Network (CCN).

As a piece of urban infrastructure, Nautilus offers a pedestrian connection from the higher street level to the water’s edge, acting as a threshold between road and recreational space with a bicycle lane; and creating new spatial possibilities for facilitating and encouraging cultural events and gatherings on this previously underutilized site.

The intention of the authors of Nautilus was to re-animate an overlooked and neglected part of Skopje and endow it not with explicit codes and meanings, but rather, with the much-needed possibility for people to gather in public space. In that sense, unlike the other structures in the area, Nautilus does not transmit concrete messages: it is an open question. Moreover, the methodology of the project encompasses far more than just its construction; as it includes conversations with locals, production teams, workers and manufacturers both local and international, group of swiss and macedonian students, and the Swiss photographer Joël Tettamanti who produced a series of city photographs in conjunction with the construction process.

The twenty meter long primary structure of Nautilus is constructed over and around the stone embankment wall, but does not touch it. It is built entirely out of steel and clad in strategic locations with a woven and painted textile developed especially for the project. The textile is used as a frame for the site, a projection surface and a delineator of different spaces of transition within the otherwise rigid repeated steel structure. On the riverside, it rises six meters above the bicycle path, presenting a tall screen to the water upon which images can be projected; but on the road side its height remains modest and unimposing, inviting discovery and inhabitation.

Following the realization of Nautilus, the City of Skopje, with help from its residents, have begun to take care of the vegetation and maintain the site, which is now witnessing more frequent use. Setting the precedent for these developments, an important aspect of the project has involved activating the latent as-found site conditions as an act of design in itself; one which is remains ongoing even after the completion of the primary structure. The display of care for the ground, site cleaning and maintenance are all considered as part of the design method, and part of the ongoing conversation between the initiators of the project and its local participants.

Forming part of a knowledge exchange within the project, a group of ten architecture students from Switzerland together with another fifteen students from Skopje helped to realize and construct the structure in August 2015, in conjunction with the core project team.