Ukraine: Architecture Before the Bombs

We interrupt our regularly scheduled, nonessential programming about mid-century architecture and old cars to mention that World Central Kitchen and the International Rescue Committee are still serving refugees from the war in Ukraine as well as the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan.  And now, some pictures of the infrastructure Ukrainian forces are defending...

Colors of the Mikhailovsky Monastery in Kyiv reflect the blue sky and golden wheat fields that inspired Ukraine's flag. These shots were taken by contributor Keith Carlson back in April of 2019, the year Volodymyr Zelensky won the country's  presidential election.  At that point, what the media called "low-level conflict" had been going on in eastern Donbas for around five years, since the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014.  The monastery has reflected the violent history of "the breadbasket of Europe", contested as a prize of great powers in World Wars 1 and 2, and a country which lost 7 million people to World War 2...

Originally built in the medieval period in Byzantine style, the exterior was entirely remodeled in the 18th century in baroque style. The original cathedral and monastery complex was entirely demolished on Stalin's orders in the 1930s, a period when the Soviet dictator's program of forced farming collectivization was causing widespread and preventable starvation. What the above photos show is the structure rebuilt after Ukrainian independence in 1991, and opened to the public 8 years later.

The port city of Odessa is known for its pastel-colored, neo-baroque apartment buildings, and until the latest war, a lively jazz scene.  The Odessa Passage, above, is a 4-story hotel with glass-roofed pedestrian passages that was built in the late 19th century.  The Passage houses shops, restaurants and offices, and is one of the historic buildings now being surrounded with sandbags on streets closed by Ukrainian defense forces.  Below, the legendary Potemkin Stairs, completed in 1841 as a formal entry to Odessa from the harbor,  featured prominently in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin...

Below, two of the apartment buildings with pastel color schemes seemingly designed, as in Scandinavian countries, to fend off cheerless, dark winters...

Below, a geometric roofscape with reddish tiles has something like a Mediterranean atmosphere.

Shown below, the Latin Cathedral in Lviv, Western Ukraine, also known as the Cathedral of the Assumption, was consecrated in 1481.

Outside Lviv in the Shevchenko Grove, the Shevchenkivskyi Hai Museum of Folk Architecture and Crafts includes this ancient wooden church...

A statue in Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, the city in Western Ukraine that has become a focus of refugees fleeing the war, including those traveling to Poland...

After independence and the 2004 and 2014 revolutions, architects designed shopfronts in postmodern and sometimes surrealist motifs that contrasted with the traditional architecture of the facades.

Tourists, however, were drawn to the classic examples of Ukrainian architecture, etched sharply under the vast blue sky, and the bright colors of the images on the Orthodox churches.  

Remembered for rejecting proposed ties to the European Union for closer ties to Russia, Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine's president from 2010 to 2014, was also known for using public funds to build a bloated palace for himself, complete with gold plumbing fixtures and the car collection housed in this vast garage...

The cars reflect the same taste as those gold plumbing fixtures, consisting mostly of big limousines favored by the Soviet-backed nomenklatura, the bureaucrats who ran the governments of Eastern Bloc countries. There are a few more mainstream Russian products, like the late 50s-early 60s Volga below.  The cream-colored sedan above and the red & blue wagon next to it are also Volgas (think police or security services); to the right of the wagon are two Pobedas (Pobeda means victory in Russian), made by GAZ, the makers of the Volga, from 1946-'58.

Mostly, though, it's a lineup of items like this Chaika four-door convertible. The Chaika, like the even bigger Zis and Zil which carried Soviet leaders from the mid-40s into the 80s, was originally based on the American Packard (this looks like a '56), but by the early 60s the template had shifted to Cadillac. The big, anonymous parade float to the left of the Chaika is a Zil...

Things didn't end well for Yanukovych.  Accused of fraud during a runoff election in 2004 which led to widespread protests and the Orange Revolution of that year, he was elected president in 2010, but driven into exile in Russia after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, leaving behind this late-Thirties DKW, an ancestor of the Audi, along with other loot on display in his palace, which has become a public museum.  Ukrainian courts eventually convicted him of treason in absentia.

We'll close with another image from the Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, a city which was, until a recent attack on an air base, a place regarded as relatively safe.  Architects in the USA tend to get upset when historic buildings are demolished without due process, but another level of outrage is triggered when buildings sheltering people from an unprovoked war on their country are brought down with rocket attacks.  Targets of recent attacks have included a maternity clinic, a historic theater sheltering hundreds, and a building clearly marked "CHILDREN"...in Russian. 

 

Photo Credits:  

All photos were kindly provided, with some history notes, by Keith Carlson. 

*Footnote:  
The architecture website archinect.com has provided excellent coverage of modern and historic architecture in Ukraine, and also on the latest efforts by Ukrainians to save their neighbors and their built environment while under aerial bombardment.  The easiest way to read these is to start with the March 14 post by Josh Niland.  Links don't always work on this blog, but here's a link anyway...

https://archinect.com/news/tag/17154/ukraine