How Architecture Became One of Ukraine’s Essential Defenses

An exhibition in downtown Manhattan showcases more than a dozen grass-roots efforts to rebuild war-stricken cities.

When the German Army finally broke through in central Ukraine in September 1941, pasting up ordinances around Kyiv to announce a new occupying authority, they had only a few days’ calm. Less than a week after the occupation began, an explosion went off in a children’s toy store on Khreshchatyk Street — the capital’s grandest shopping boulevard, Kyiv’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue or the Champs-Élysées. Soon the city hall and the Communist Party headquarters crumbled. Fires spread out from the Khreshchatyk into the old houses and apartment blocks of the city center: The Soviets were dynamiting Kyiv, reducing their own city to ungovernable rubble, in a ferocious counteraction that would be commemorated very differently in Russia and in Ukraine.

Walk through central Kyiv today, down the Khreshchatyk, past the grand Independence Square and the ritzy Tsum department store, and you can read the history of postwar and post-independence Ukraine in the subsequent architecture.

The marble of the Stalinist skyscrapers, the concrete of the cheap Khrushchevka housing 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, a present one. In the third year of this epochal war — which has destroyed some 210,000 buildings, according to a recent New York Times investigation — Russian forces continue to target civilian habitations in contravention of international law. When the city is a battleground, architecture becomes an act of defense and defiance.

There’s a high-spirited, highly welcome exhibition right now in New York that maps Russia’s attacks against Ukraine as also a war against the built environment, and the manners in which architects, designers and ad hoc collectives are fighting back in brick and mortar. “Constructing Hope: Ukraine,” on view at the Center for Architecture in downtown Manhattan, brings together models, maquettes, and videos documenting more than a dozen grass-roots initiatives in contemporary Ukrainian housing and infrastructure. There’s snap-together furniture for displaced person camps in the west, student-designed playgrounds that can be quickly constructed in the east — and, throughout, a double focus on design as an emergency measure and a long-term national project.

The Ukrainian government and army have already begun major rebuilding projects. Bucha and Irpin, the devastated Kyiv suburbs, have become significant construction sites. The architect Norman Foster has been engaged for a new master plan for Kharkiv, whose extraordinary density of modern architecture faces near daily bombardment. But this exhibition keeps its focus on informal and bottom-up efforts in Ukrainian architecture. It showcases the work of architects inside and outside the country, but also some of Ukraine’s most important artists — not to mention the ravers and DJs of Kyiv’s world-leading electronic music scene, who have been aiding reconstruction efforts while the records spin.