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Architects are rebuilding Ukraine, even while bombs are still falling

Pro bono projects and humanitarian building is already underway in Ukraine, often instigated and funded by the architects themselves.

Architects are rebuilding Ukraine, even while bombs are still falling

BY Nate Berglong read

In March 2022, barely a month into the war in Ukraine, Nikita Bielokopytov learned that the home of his grandparents had been destroyed. Its roof and walls had been blown up, turning a quaint village house into a pile of pale bricks and burnt cinders. Immediately, Bielokopytov, who is an architect and partner in the Kyiv firm New Office of Vital Architecture, or NOVA, set out to design his grandparents a new home.

[Photo: courtesy NOVA]

The design is simple but contemporary: a compact two-story building with a slightly off-center pitched roof that blends seamlessly into its dark exterior walls. Cognizant that the homes of many other people were also being destroyed, Bielokopytov decided to freely release the plans for his grandparents’ new home, slashing the costs for people who want to rebuild on their land. Those plans are what Bielokopytov considers a modest effort, but they’ve also sparked a broader reconsideration of what it means to be an architect in a place facing an unending barrage of attacks. “It’s difficult to be an architect in a war country,” Bielokopytov says. “You understand that the way you can help is by doing what you do best, and this is to make projects and to share your knowledge.”

[Image: courtesy NOVA]

For a profession so tied to the creation of the buildings and spaces of day-to-day life, architects in Ukraine have seen the war in their country as a direct attack, and a call to action. From the first days of the war, which started February 24, 2022, buildings and urban spaces were repeat targets for the Russian military, with apartment buildings, train stations, civic centers, and even schools under attack. 

Formal architecture work stopped almost immediately, with many clients pausing or canceling projects planned for places suddenly being torn apart by bombs, missiles, and mortars. “No one’s buying new apartments right now,” says Bielokopytov. “We haven’t gotten any new projects in Ukraine.”

No new paid projects, that is. Like many architecture firms that have remained in Ukraine during the war, NOVA has found a new and unexpected avenue for its architectural skills through the humanitarian and recovery projects the firm has instigated on its own initiative. Using their own unpaid time, and mostly without any guarantee that their designs can secure the funding to be built at a scale necessary for the recovery of the country, architects are plunging ahead with designs and building projects that lack one of the most important elements of any development: a paying client.

Designing a project without a client is something most firms, especially smaller or younger firms, do to test out ideas, prove their design chops, and, ideally, drum up business. In the context of war, the effort becomes something much more altruistic.

It’s a situation many Ukrainian architects are now facing. Amid the shock and general outrage over the war itself, the urge to help is widespread, and the skills of an architect are needed. It’s also pushing designers to pursue architectural work—often desperately needed building, shelter, and emergency-response projects—that could quickly turn to rubble. “You’re trying to find your role as an architect in a country where there is constant destruction happening,” says Bielokopytov. “You’re used to creating, and this creation takes a long time. Destruction can take one day.”

[Image: courtesy Balbek Bureau]

After the bombs started dropping, architect Slava Balbek’s initial shock turned to practicalities. With so many residential buildings being targeted and destroyed, Kyiv-based Balbek understood immediately that people across the country were being forcefully displaced from their homes. Within two weeks, his 15-year-old firm, Balbek Bureau, began designing a prototype-housing system that could be used to quickly build temporary homes for those who’d lost their own.

“The amount of destruction the war brought called for action immediately,” says Balbek. “We had resources, and since we were our clients, we could create any terms we wanted and communicate values close to our hearts. We were doing what felt right.”

[Image: courtesy Balbek Bureau]

Less than a month into the war, Balbek Bureau completed its design and started raising funds to get the project built. The idea is to build a semi-permanent housing development for internally displaced people, using a modular-construction system that Balbek says can be built in two to four months and be used as transitional housing for two to four years before being converted to other uses, like school buildings or medical centers. The project, originally designed without a specific site in mind, would create enough room for 15 families across two buildings—one a communal dorm-style building with a large shared kitchen and bathrooms, and the other a single-story apartment building intended for families with children. Designed around a courtyard and with space for workshops and coworking rooms, the project looks more like a contemporary development than refugee housing.

“The task for architecture is not only to solve ergonomic problems. It’s also about mental health . . . how people are fixing themselves after being displaced, or having lost something, or lost someone, or lost their connections,” says Balbek. “These environments will help them to recover.”

[Image: courtesy Balbek Bureau]

The adaptability of the project is a key part of its feasibility, Balbek argues. By designing structures that can meet the short-term needs of displaced people and then serve another role once they eventually move back home or elsewhere, the buildings can provide ongoing returns on the initial investment, which Balbek says is a mix of government funding, private investment, and donations. “It should be attractive not only to the people who are using it, but the people who are investing in it,” he says.

[Photo: courtesy Replus Bureau]

By fall 2022, Balbek Bureau had an agreement with the government of Bucha, outside Kyiv, for the construction of what Balbek hopes to be the pilot of a series of its housing projects. More than a third of the roughly $1 million budget had been raised. In October, Ikea committed to donating the furniture and home decorations for the residential parts of the project. Later, a collaboration between Balbek, Ukrainian fashion designer Svitlana Bevza, and Mastercard raised more than $200,000 for the project. Ground was broken in late January, and Balbek expects the homes to be ready for residents this spring.

[Photo: courtesy Replus Bureau]

Other architects across the country are instigating projects more immediately focused on recovery and defense. Lviv-based architecture firm Replus Bureau started offering its design services in the quickest way possible—with tubes of cardboard inside an empty gym. Relatively unscathed by the war’s early aggressions, Lviv and other parts of Western Ukraine became magnets for people fleeing attacks in the south and east. This rush of internally displaced people created the need for rapid shelter.

[Photo: courtesy Replus Bureau]

Dmytro Sorokevych, chief architect at Replus Bureau, says the firm quickly latched onto a humanitarian response design by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who created a cardboard-based system to quickly and cheaply turn empty rooms into humane shelters. Developed as a response to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s northeastern coast, Ban’s design uses cardboard tubes to turn large spaces like empty gyms into a grid of fabric-divided spaces for semi-private sleeping. Sorokevych says the system helped make what would have otherwise been large rooms stuffed with crates and bedding into more dignified places to temporarily shelter.

[Photo: courtesy Replus Bureau]

“We, along with other organizations in the region, were searching for buildings that could accommodate as many people as possible,” Sorokevych says. “One of the main challenges was ensuring minimal living standards for these individuals. We had to find fast and cost-effective solutions that could be deployed quickly, as thousands of people were arriving every day.”

Replus Bureau deployed the cardboard system in several places throughout Lviv, and other architects in places like Poland and France have been using Ban’s design, in coordination with the Voluntary Architects’ Network, the NGO Ban founded in 1995. Replus Bureau has also been taking on other war-related projects, including the design of military facilities. “We were forced to adapt to the changing needs of the country,” he says.

The three-year-old Kyiv-based firm Prototype also found itself looking for different kinds of work once the war started. Before the war, the firm was “loaded with projects,” according to founder Ivan Protasov. One, with a cultural institution from Denmark, stalled as the threat of war loomed. “A week before the war, they evacuated to Denmark. We were like yo, come on, the war will not happen. And then on February 24th, everything stopped,” says Protasov.

[Image: Ivan Protasov, Anton Kuzmin, Pylyp Chaikovsky-Vamush]

To stay active and be of help, Protasov’s firm teamed with a group of volunteers on a project to raise money for the Ukrainian army by turning destroyed Russian military equipment into gallery-styled art pieces that are then auctioned. One, a piece of a periscope from a Russian tank destroyed in a village outside Kyiv, was recently given to the country’s defense minister. “We call them trophies,” Protasov says.

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[Image: Ivan Protasov, Anton Kuzmin, Pylyp Chaikovsky-Vamush]

Other architects are finding existing projects where they can apply their skills. Uliana Dzhurliak, an architect and PhD student researching social housing, closed her Kyiv-based architecture firm when the war broke out. By summer she was volunteering as a program manager for the Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation’s NEST project, which provides mobile modular homes to families whose homes have been destroyed but who plan to rebuild. “Our people want to rebuild their nests,” Dzhurliak says. “They want to be back on their land, their gardens, their apple and cherry orchards, the place where they lived many happy years, where their children were born, and where their ancestors are buried.”

Bielokopytov of NOVA says his firm is also working on longer-term projects for the recovery of the country, in conjunction with the Onova Foundation, which he cofounded. When the war is over—”after the victory,” as Bielokopytov and several others interviewed for this article say—NOVA has designs ready for community centers that the Onova Foundation plans to build as new hubs for small villages around the country. In cooperation with Hospitallers, a volunteer paramedic organization working on the front lines in Ukraine, NOVA has designed a multifunctional building that can fit on a modest plot and act as a hub to help communities recover. “We think that the best way to get people to come back is to make infrastructure for them,” Bielokopytov says. “In terms of infrastructure, we need a lot, but what we need most is a place for people to gather.”

[Image: courtesy NOVA]

Designing and launching these projects is an act of defiance in the face of destruction. It’s also an act of faith to some degree, as the funds to realize projects are often far greater than what the architects and design firms can afford on their own.

Balbek, an architect with a relatively high profile in Ukraine, understands there’s a limit to how much any single firm can spend on its own humanitarian-focused projects, and a limit to how much these projects can rely on philanthropy. “It’s hard because companies in Ukraine have been involved in donations since the first days of the war,” he says. “People are exhausted of donating.”

Even so, Balbek says he’s seeing more and more Ukrainian architects starting to develop social initiatives and building projects as the war enters its second year—whether through sheer hope that the war ends soon or fatigue over sitting and waiting for the atmosphere to become safer for development. “There is demand, and a new kind of client is already emerging: those who want to participate in Ukraine’s reconstruction and invest in the country’s future,” he says.

Protasov of Prototype says his firm is currently working on three separate pro bono development projects in Ukraine, each focused on rebuilding or redeveloping areas affected by the war. “We developed concepts pro bono because we understand that the clients that are brave enough to start development projects in Ukraine during the war are dependent on a lot of other things going right, and they basically also work pro bono in these first steps,” he says. “There is this idea [that people have] that working partially pro bono for clients is not a good thing. But I would say this person should try to work during war in her or his country.”

Bielokopytov says his firm is spending around half its time on projects like the community center and the free housing plans originally designed for his grandparents. It remains unclear where the full funding for these efforts will come from. “I’m not sure,” Bielokopytov says. “We’ll figure it out.”

[Image: courtesy NOVA]

Some funding may end up coming from outside work. Every architect interviewed for this article has been actively expanding their work outside Ukraine, even those who’ve never worked on international projects.

“We are now focused abroad,” says Bielokopytov. With the other half of the firm’s time not spent working on pro bono or humanitarian projects in Ukraine, NOVA is trying to attract clients in Europe. “We understand this is possible right now, maybe more possible than before,” he says.

Outside interest in Ukraine is undeniably high, both in the short and long terms, at least from other architects. English architect Norman Foster, head of the largest architecture firm in the U.K., has committed his foundation‘s efforts to producing a viable masterplan for the rebuilding of Kharkiv.

[Image: WZMH Architects]

And the Canadian firm WZMH Architects is moving forward on plans to splice modular building elements into the damaged parts of residential buildings, repairing the damaged parts of  otherwise structurally sound buildings with newly built chunks. The first prototype version of this concrete rebuilding system is expected to be constructed this spring. Zenon Radewych, a principal at WZMH Architects, says his firm and its Ukrainian partners are now working with the government of the Kyiv suburb Irpin on a specific building that could be the first to utilize this system. A drone-based lidar scan of the building has been completed, and WZMH is now analyzing the resulting 3D model to understand how the prefabricated concrete units can slot into place. Radewych says this first project will have relevance across the country, where many residential buildings are “all built kind of the same,” he says, out of standardized concrete elements that stack like uniform building blocks. “We’ve scanned this one building, but it’s almost like the same information is applicable to any other building.”

[Image: WZMH Architects]

It’s undeniable that there will be business opportunities for architects as cities and communities embark on rebuilding efforts, and outside design expertise will come in handy. But architects in Ukraine are also hoping that, by starting now, they can help guide the course of the country’s recovery from within. “I hope that the government and the municipalities will continue to listen to the people, and that everything will be done through open competitions,” says Protasov.

But even while many architects instigate their own projects to push the recovery forward, they also acknowledge that the ongoing war could bring their projects, even their lives, to an abrupt end. “The war will continue for a long time,” says Dzhurliak, the architect now helping provide mobile homes to families. “Helping our forces and civilians is the main goal for me. If I stay alive, I will go to the east and south of Ukraine, the regions that are suffering the most and being destroyed by the Russians. If my architectural knowledge will be useful, I will work.”

Through their pro bono work and humanitarian efforts, architects are finding ways to be useful now. Some, like Balbek, are even doing double-duty, putting in rotations with the defense forces.

For others, even short-term architecture work or emergency response is too slow. As the war drags on, many have made the decision to fight. One designer, declining an emailed interview request for this article, said he was simply no longer working as an architect. “For now, I’m a serviceman of the Ukrainian Navy forces,” he wrote.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nate Berg is a staff writer at Fast Company, where he writes about design, architecture, urban development, and industrial design. He has written for publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Wired, the Guardian, Dwell, Wallpaper, and Curbed More


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