Housing is the most omnipresent urban typology. Housing is also the essential architecture of
the human condition. Perhaps more than any other architectural species housing determines the
ways urbanites construct their lives and build their shared futures. The all-out war in Ukraine
started by the Russian Federation in 2022 has disproportionally affected housing and
residential infrastructure. The destruction is so targeted and the damage so significant that
it has disfigured entire neighbourhoods and erased entire cities. With the scale of damage and
loss in mind and the future wide-ranging reconstruction that will inevitably take place after
the war this study examines the history and typologies of mass housing in Ukraine. It does so
in order to evaluate what is lost explain the diversity of modes of urban living that exist in
Ukrainian cities and finally reconsider the narrative of how Ukrainian housing came about.
The study covers the period of the last 100 years: the time of the most dramatic expansion and
change in character of Ukrainian cities. It begins with the experimental buildings constructed
in the Soviet Central and Eastern Ukraine and Polish Western Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s
continues by looking at type projects from the Stalin era as well as the serial apartment
blocks built during the reigns of Khrushchev and Brezhnev and in the late USSR. Finally it
showcases individually designed yet also typical residential buildings from the
turbo-capitalist period of the 1990s and 2000s. With the help of archival materials-texts
blueprints and photographs-as well as contemporary documentation the authors analyse 30
examples of Ukrainian-designed or modified housing types. Through uncovering the Ukrainian
context as well as the work of Ukrainian architects design institutions contractors and
developers the history of Ukrainian housing is emancipated from the Russian narrative of the
Soviet past. By doing so we aim to write the history of a specifically Ukrainian building
tradition and contribute to embedding it in the context of all-European architectural history.
This title is part of the "Histories of Ukrainian Architecture" programme initiated by DOM
publishers in response to Russia's attack on Ukraine's sovereignty on 24 February 2022.
