The installation and the drawings 'Obsessive Setting' by Yane Calovski cover a chapter in urban planning for Skopje, beginning in 1963 after a devastating earthquake. Nearly the whole Old Town was destroyed, three quarters of the inhabitants lost their homes and only 20% of the buildings were not damaged. With international support by the UN it was planned to rebuild the city. An international urban design competition was launched, won by the Japanese architecture firm Kenzo Tange. The blueprint took account of the preserved, ancient and original framework of the city, provided new perspectives with regard to culture, communication and education and established a clear traffic routeing. Inner-city, eight-storey block of flats should counter the depopulation of the centre and allow a direct community supply of residents.
'Our project, based on the preliminary Master Plan and studies compiled by the City of Skopje and collaborated on by the United Nations, manifests a system by which the mechanism of our contemporary society could be transformed into a spatial structure. This structuring system would continue to create the bridge between our ever- progressing civilization and the constant factor of humanity.' Office Kenzo Tange
The utopian and optimistic concept of the 1960s for a perfect city for the masses of the working people, was only partially executed and received many distortions, so that Kenzo Tange soon distanced himself from the implementation of the blueprint. The plan was never completely realized; instead, it is marked by the
discrepancies between utopia for a city, planned on the drawing board, the real need of the population on urban development decision by the government.
Since 2006 Yane Calovski was working on the masterplan. The drawings are based on some of the original photographs showing the team of Kenzo Tange Associates working on the project, which were preserved in the Archive of Urban Development and Architecture in Skopje until 2014. Then it was closed and later destroyed in a fire in 2017.