When the German army finally broke into central Ukraine in September 1941, pasting orders around Kiev to announce a new occupying authority, they had only a few days of peace. Less than a week after the occupation began, an explosion occurred in a children’s toy store on Khreshchatyk Street – the capital’s grand shopping boulevard, the equivalent of Kiev’s Fifth Avenue or the Champs Elysees. Soon the city hall and the headquarters of the Communist Party collapsed. Fires spread from Khreshchatyk to the old houses and apartment buildings of the city center: The Soviets dynamited Kiev, turned their city into ungoverned ruins, in a wild reaction that would be celebrated very differently in Russia and Ukraine.
Walk through downtown Kyiv today, down Khreshchatyk, past the grand Independence Square and the Tsum department store, and you can read the history of post-war and post-independence Ukraine in the architecture that followed.
The marble of Stalinist skyscrapers, the concrete of cheap Khrushchev blocks, the glass and chrome of the oligarchs’ new towers: Within each of these materials is a record of destruction and reconstruction, of past wars and, now, of a present one. In the third year of this seasonal war — which has destroyed some 210,000 buildings, according to a recent New York Times investigation — Russian forces continue to target civilian homes in violation of international law. When the city is a battlefield, architecture becomes an act of defense and defiance.
There’s a spirited, much-welcomed exhibition currently in New York that charts Russia’s attacks on Ukraine as a war on the built environment and the ways architects, designers, and ad hoc collectives are fighting back with bricks and mortar. “Constructing Hope: Ukraine,” on display at the Center for Architecture in midtown Manhattan, brings together models, mock-ups and videos documenting more than a dozen grassroots initiatives in contemporary Ukrainian housing and infrastructure. There is prefabricated furniture for displaced persons camps in the West, playgrounds designed by students that can be built quickly in the East — and, throughout, a dual focus on design as an emergency measure and as a long-term national project.
The Ukrainian government and military have already begun major reconstruction projects. Bucha and Irpin, the ruined suburbs of Kiev, have become important construction sites. Architect Norman Foster has committed to a new master plan for Kharkiv, whose extraordinary density of modern architecture faces almost daily bombardment. But this exhibition maintains its focus on informal and bottom-up efforts in Ukrainian architecture. It showcases the work of architects inside and outside the country, as well as some of Ukraine’s most influential artists — not to mention the ravers and DJs of Kyiv’s world-leading electronic music scene, who are helping rebuilding efforts while the records spin.
Vladimir V. Putin launched a full-scale war against Ukraine in February 2022, but Russia has actually been at war with the country since 2014, when it responded to Ukraine’s democratic, pro-European Maidan revolution by seizing Crimea and invading in the easternmost region of the country. regions. This lower-intensity war meant that Ukrainian architects and urban planners had experience with displacement and destruction when, two years ago, millions of citizens began to flee from the east to the west.
In Lviv, Ukrainian firm Drozdov & Partners and student volunteers from the Kharkiv School of Architecture quickly made separate cardboard units for hundreds of displaced people, adapting and re-locating a system first developed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. An NGO, MetaLab, designed a neighborhood project for those who had lost their homes in the war. Called Co-Haty, a play on the Ukrainian words for “love” and “home,” it features a quick-to-assemble modular wooden bed of the same name that you can now find in empty government buildings and pop-up shelters. .
In Lviv and the other cities of western Ukraine, your home is relatively safe. In Kiev and cities to the east, it must double as an emergency shelter. Every Ukrainian now knows the two-wall rule: When the air strike goes off and if you can’t get somewhere safer, you want to move inside your apartment so that if an outside wall is hit by a missile the inside can stop the fragments. (The bathroom is usually your best bet.) You tape up the windows—as graphic designer Aliona Solomadina points out in her view of the Architecture Center at LaGuardia Place—but that might not be enough. The blast wave from an exploding shell can shatter windows more than 1,000 feet away, and thanks to Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine’s electrical infrastructure, winter can set right in.
Windows are the most vulnerable element of architecture, as well as one of the most expensive. Before the full-scale invasion, Ukrainians got theirs from now-closed Donbas factories or Russian exporters. Today, thousands of used or reused PVC windows are being funneled from Warsaw to Kiev and onward to the most threatened areas, a project by the Polish-based BRDA foundation that has enabled many internally displaced people in Ukraine to rebuild and return to their homes. As this show recounts, before the Maidan revolution of 2014, collective architecture in Ukraine had a bad rap — it sounded Soviet and had no place in the turbo-capitalist Ukraine of the 1990s and 2000s. Today, amid existential threats for both the social and the architectural fabric, the common good returns.
You have a roof over your head, you’ve mastered the art of sleeping in the bathtub during raids, but there will always be other homes in your dreams: your dreams, and also your nightmares. In 2022 the artist collective Prykarpattian Theater gathered more than a dozen displaced Ukrainians and asked them to bring their memories to the homes they had been forced to leave. Porches, gables, a simple concrete garage: These were the building blocks of an independent Ukraine they had left behind. Together, the artists and refugees produced small, tender, fragile models of these bygone houses, which now fill the main gallery of the Center for Architecture – one of many new Ukrainian artistic ventures that have redefined culture as a practice of archiving against oblivion .
“We talk about the cities we lived in — / that went / into the night like ships on the winter sea…” begins a poem by the Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan. Kiev and Kharkiv, Odesa and Dnipro, have sailed through the black waters of this century before us, and one of the values of this report is how it demonstrates that the war in Ukraine — an imperial war, a cultural war — does not receive country “. over there,” some safe distance from our freedoms and our bank accounts. The war long ago spilled beyond Ukraine’s borders, into Europe’s economies and America’s political campaigns. It won’t end soon and it will reshape our cities before it’s over.
Building Hope: Ukraine
Through September 3 at the Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place, Manhattan. 212-683-0023, centerforarchitecture.org.
