In Macedonia today, buildings are designed and built under two rulebooks at once. One is the Eurocodes - the European set of standards for structural design and construction. The other is the standards from the 1980s and 1990s. Both apply in parallel, and it has been that way for a whole decade.

The experts themselves confirmed it at the national conference "Eurocodes 2.0 - From Standardisation to National Implementation" at the Chamber of Commerce. Josif Josifovski, dean of the Faculty of Civil Engineering, says the country has been working on introducing the Eurocodes for around ten years, but the parallel use of the old and new regulations still goes on.

"It's a complex of standards that distils European experience from the past seven or eight decades," Josifovski explains. In his view, safety improves at every stage - from design to construction - which is why the future should be Eurocodes only.

The fear that always comes up is cost. Do tougher standards mean even pricier flats, in a market where the price per square metre already hurts? Josifovski says not necessarily. The Eurocodes are flexible and allow costs to be adapted to needs. "Our goal should always be quality and safety," he says.

Andrea Serafimovski, president of the Chamber of Commerce's construction association, admits the process has run into "many difficulties", but wants engineers to master the Eurocodes faster and the state to adopt them as national standards.

Skopje is a city that remembers 1963, when an earthquake levelled much of it. In a city like that, the question of which rulebook is used to calculate the load-bearing capacity of new buildings shouldn't have two answers. If the profession agrees, and ten years haven't been enough, who exactly is waiting - and for what?