American Roadside Architecture in Skopje

Skopje _ A UFO-shaped gas station, lodging shacks looking like Indian wigwams and a train carriage diner, can all be seen at a photo exhibition showing 20th century American roadside architecture that opened in Skopje last week.

The photo collection by John Margolies, takes the Macedonian public through some of the most inventive and daring periods of America’s free-enterprise economy during the first decades of the 20th century.

As the mass production of cars created a new-found mobility and freedom for the US public, literally millions of small businesses began to mushroom along the newly-built highways to provide all manner of services for motorists.

“This is a trip down memory lane for me,” the US Ambassador to Macedonia, Gillian Milovanovic, said at the opening of the exhibition in Skopje’s city museum on February 7, noting that by the beginning of the 21st century this architecture had all but disappeared.

The building of freeways in the 1950s spelt the beginning of the end for this particularly inventive architectural era as an increasing number of small roadside businesses have been displaced by large chain stores.

Milovanovic encouraged Macedonian photographers to do a similar project in their own country, noting that it would be interesting to see a burek-shaped building.

Burek is a traditional dish, a pie made with flaky pastry, which has been popular throughout the Balkans, dating back to the times of the Ottoman Empire.

After Skopje, the exhibition will go on a tour of other towns in Macedonia.