Overview of the 70’s construction systems applied in the residential settlement “Aerodrom” - Skopje

Abstract

The intensive housing construction in the Republic of North Macedonia, which began in the 1960s, especially after the catastrophic earthquake in Skopje in 1963, was based primarily on the huge development of the construction operation, whose power and opportunities could not be expressed only in Macedonia, but with great success was carried out with the largest construction operations in the former: SFR Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, USSR; as well as in Germany, the Arab countries: Algeria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt and others. According to the approved new urban plan of the city of Skopje, the most intensive building construction in Macedonia started in the seventies. New residential settlements emerged (Karpoš, Železara, Kisela Voda, etc.), which on a large scale began to give the physiognomy of the city. Also, the construction of the central city area with social, administrative and residential buildings started even more intensively (according to the project of the Japanese architect Kenzo Tange), designated as “city wall” and “city gates”. The growth and expansion of the city on a daily basis pressured the management structures, among others smaller ones, to start building the largest residential complex “Aerodrom”. The buildings were built with inflexible technologies (with large surface and tunnel plates), where the possibility of changing the organization of the apartments is excluded, which was not the case with the buildings built with classical skeletal systems. This paper aims to give an overview of the applied construction systems and technologies of construction and the correlation between the structure and the construction of the apartment and the structure of the family in the residential buildings from the settlement “Aerodrom” in Skopje, built in 1977.