Art Fortress Kale: Public Art Project

The International Competition for Preparation of Preliminary Urban and architectural development design for the arrangement of the Kale Hill in Skopje constitutes an integral part of the long-term project Kale – Cultural Fortress, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje. The goal of the project and the Competition is to encourage the revitalization and spatial arrangement of Kale Hill into an attractive and vibrant city attraction with various cultural, educational, and recreational functions.

Two important cultural monuments dominate Kale Hill: The medieval fortress of Kale and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The exceptional historic and contemporary significance of these two imposing structures for the City of Skopje has been largely diminished due to many years of neglect of the broader location of Kale Hill.

Feeling the detrimental consequences of this situation regarding the availability to the public on one hand, while being aware of the enormous potential of this space in possible support and expansion of the diversity and attractiveness of our programs, on the other hand, the team of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje, announced this competition for preliminary design proposals which will initiate cultivating of the Kale Hill into a “cultural fortress” and a widely usable public space.

Within the general competition framework, the proposals were expected also to consider and emphasize the natural advantages of the location and its contents from terrain and in that sense its recreational capacities; topographic diversity with multiple places that provide wonderful views of the city panorama and the landscape of the Skopje valley.

The second, equally important component of the project proposals, refers to the Kale Hill, as unique public space integrated with dynamic cultural content, for which the Museum of Contemporary Art in Skopje is the primary program platform, including organization of artistic, sculptural, architectural, performance, multimedia, residential, educational seminars and workshops and other types of interdisciplinary or community projects and public events.

Seventeen works participated in the competition for the design of a conceptual architectural and urban solution for arrangement of the hill Kale in Skopje until the deadline of 15 May 2019.

Working in two separate  sessions for evaluation of the received works, the jury decided to award two  equal first prizes of 125.000 denars to the works under the code “SO 162”, project of  architects Aleksandra Shulevska and Kristof Schlüβler and “Modul”, project of Ana Rafailovska, Marija Antic Nikolova, Lidija Ristovska, and Nevenka Mancheva Adzievska, architects from Skopje. The third prize of 50.000 denars was given to the work under the code “LOG 01”, project of Aleksandar Vrangalovski and Eleonora Popovska, architects from Berlin with collaborators Lazo Lazarov and Maja Boshkovich.

The exhibition titled Art Fortress: International Competition for Preliminary Urban and Architectural Development Design for Arrangement of the Kale Hill in Skopje will show resulting conceptual proposals in all of the 17 projects.