A Display of Hope and Reconstruction in Ukraine

15. August 2024

All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects

Constructing Hope: Ukraine is an exhibition at the Center for Architecture in New York City that gathers the grassroots work of numerous multidisciplinary creatives who are applying architectural thinking to support Ukraine's ongoing reconstruction efforts. Take a visual tour through the small yet abundantly hopeful exhibition.

People walking past the Center for Architecture in New York's Greenwich Village may be pulled into the exhibition by the simple yet effective application of yellow tape to the building's storefront (photo here and at top), a reference to the tactics residents of Ukraine employ to protect their windows and themselves from broken glass caused by Russian shelling.

While the exhibition focuses on small-scale efforts, it acknowledges the immense scale of the conflict, as in this map of the millions of displaced Ukrainians covering one wall of the gallery.

The exhibition encompasses two floors of the Center for Architecture, with the main gallery on the ground floor presenting half of its contents. Note how exhibition designer Hliona Solomadina used the yellow tape from the storefront as a device for framing the different projects on the walls.

The center of the main gallery consists of models from OUR APARTMENTS, HOUSES, COTTAGES, GARAGES, OFFICES AND BACKYARDS, in which the Prykarpattian Theater collective worked with displaced residents to create models of their homes; the models will become part of MOCA NGO's “Wartime Archive.”

Visible here beyond one of the models are screens where visitors can watch THE HUMAN CHAIN, Nataliia Mysak's documentary that explores spatial practices in the production of architecture via a series of narratives that “often complement each other and sometimes oppose each other.”

Given that most windows in Ukraine before 2022 were imported from Russia and Belarus, residents have had to look elsewhere for much-needed replacement windows since then. WINDOW illustrates how the BRDA initiative has brought damaged yet serviceable PVC windows from Poland to Ukraine to support residents rebuilding their homes and promote circular construction.

BRDA produced a free catalog, in Polish and Ukrainian, that has “easy, clear instructions on how to fix your home with a reuse window on your own. The instructions were created with a hypothesis in mind, that temporary solutions often become solutions for much longer, and therefore the proposed DIY options are solid and safe.”

The THEATER OF HOPES AND EXPECTATIONS, another initiative of the Prykarpattian Theater collective, was a public pavilion built in Düsseldorf between August and October 2022, made from discarded stage sets provided by local theaters. After it was dismantled…

…the temporary theater was sent to Ukraine where it became a permanent home for the Honchar family in the Kyiv region.

The FIRST-AID SPATIAL KIT came out of a four-week workshop at the Kharkiv School of Architecture, in which first-year students created furniture for schools, with their designs published in the public domain so they could be replicated as needed.

The main pieces created by the students were the Nomad School Chair and Rest, Relaxation Chair, both designed for easy assembly and portability. In the distance is A CITY WITHIN A BUILDING, a film about the Mariupol Drama Theater, which was destroyed by Russian bombs on March 26, 2022.

TEMPORARY SHELTER illustrates the application of Shigeru Ban's Paper Partition System in sixteen locations in Lviv and Uman.

Moving downstairs, UNDERSTRUCTURES is a collective that produced a collection of stories, Oberih ("An item that protects"), that is part of a fundraising initiative for people affected by the war in Ukraine.

Visitors to Constructing Hope can purchase copies of Oberih, with 90% of the proceeds going to the volunteer initiatives and humanitarian aid organizations active in Ukraine.

Clearing debris is a necessary part of reconstruction and one that is the focus of Repair Together, which was launched by a group of friends in a fun way, RAVE TOLOKA, which combines debris-clearing and house building with music and dance.

Members of LIVYJ BEREH (“Left Bank,” in reference to the Dnipro River) restores roofs in villages decimated by Russian bombings while also documenting the architectural history of the villages.

Their display is accompanied by a film that shows the damage the members of LIVYJ BEREH encountered when they arrived in the villages.

The double-height space behind the storefront glass is occupied primarily by CO-HATY, a project by the NGO MetaLab that provides temporary emergency accommodations for internally displaced people in Western Ukraine.

Co-Haty (Haty translates as “houses” and Cohaty as “to love”) repurposes vacant, former Soviet municipal buildings into emergency shelters.

Integral to the effort is Tanya Pashynska's Co-Haty bed, an adaption of a Creative Commons design solution that is compact, easy to transport, multifunctional, accessible, and sustainable.

Next to Co-Haty are photographs Kyiv-based architect and artist OLEKSANDR BURLAKA.

Visitors who did not grasp the significance of the yellow tape on the Center for Architecture's storefront will understand it in Burlaka's photographs of windows that use tape and other products for protection.