The Brooklyn Rail

Constructing Hope: Ukraine has taken over the gallery spaces spanning two floors of the Center for Architecture (CFA) on LaGuardia Place. Home of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York, the CFA has a long history of programming that attempts to get architecture and architects out of our narrow bubbles and into wider political discourse.

Constructing Hope’s curation by Ashley Bigham, Betty Roytburd, and Sasha Topolnytska seeks to construct a window into daily life in Ukraine today—of the ongoing war and its atrocities, and also of resistance and unity—right in front of you, in a portable format. Perhaps if its objects and designs are hung on a wall, even framed, we can learn lessons from, and better support, the people of Ukraine in what is now their third year of resistance against Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country. And by heightening focus on the scale and vulnerability of domestic architecture in the face of conflict, the exhibition poses the home as the springboard for reconstruction.

Because the world is asking, “How will Ukraine rebuild?” Constructing Hope: Ukraine doesn’t merely ask this question again—it offers answers (plural) by design. But architecture is stubbornly large. It cannot be filed away neatly in a cabinet, although it has a long history of playing with scales. The architecture on display at the Center uses the affordances of scale to present us with solutions to an extensive set of architectural problems.

When you first enter the exhibition, you are confronted with dollhouse-sized cardboard homes on pedestals. These were made by their former inhabitants: displaced people who created them during workshops led by the Prykarpattian Theater collective in Kolomyia, Ukraine. We are left witness to an exercise in art therapy, the simple construction of “home” but at a scale that could fit in the crook of a child’s arm. When the world around you is crumbling, preservation and documentation becomes an urgent act. Restructuring is not only a spatial gesture, but a social structuring device.

This theme of documentation and collective memory persists throughout the show, a device used to bring the physical spaces of Ukrainian resistance to New York. Making your way downstairs, you encounter a publication by Understructures, Oberih. Each small book has a unique cover image: one of the oberihs, or talismans, documented within its pages. Oberihs are items that stick with you no matter what, objects that bring luck or feel like home. Each book traces the lives of various oberihs, narrated by their collectors—histories of an object and a life at the scale of a human hand.

Turning left, there is a small corner of the exhibition filled with color. This installation is dedicated to the twin documentary and construction efforts of Livyj Bereh. Members of this volunteer organization have a dual mission: active reconstruction of destroyed homes and communities, as well as photographic documentation of their architectural histories. The project’s real-time documentation practice is a way to remember and preserve Ukrainian vernacular architecture in a time when it feels fragile.

Moving into the lower atrium space, installations graduate from memory to reconstruction. Look up to an exploded axonometric drawing suspended above you—a deconstructed bed designed by the Ukrainian NGO MetaLab. The bed is just one part of a larger architectural project called CO-HATY, whose designs—from this particular bed all the way to the scale of a reclaimed building—work to provide emergency accommodation for internally displaced people, or IDPs, in Western Ukraine. The homes and rooms the beds will furnish are documented in photographs on the walls around you. Community and comfort take root in the shell of post-Soviet municipal buildings, now furnished by elegant CO-HATY designs that fill workspaces and sun-filled kitchens. Since March 2022, these spaces have been renovated to accommodate more than 1,300 IDPs.

Through these installations we’re meant to know that the war has generated millions of IDPs and what this crisis means both spatially and socially. Photos mounted on the gallery walls illustrate this loss of home (shattered windows, blown from bombing) but curators choose to go a step further and highlight the tangible work of grassroots design collectives that have come together over that basic element of any home: the window.

This device is elemental to the show. Windows even form the spine of the exhibition’s graphic design. Created by Aliona Solomadina, the yellow overlapping stripes that define the gallery entry and snake across walls and through doorways reference the yellow tape used by Ukrainians to bolster windows against explosions. If a window shatters, it won’t only cause harm, but—with temperatures that can reach lows of negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit—could also make a home inhabitable. Practical measures against this venture into the realm of composition: the tape now signifies unity and resistance.

Activist orgs like BRDA—a network of architects, journalists, and activists from in and around the University of Warsaw—have designed a system to source and deliver unused windows to Ukrainian households that have lost them. But the design thinking doesn’t stop at the delivery: BRDA architects have created how-to-install manuals (hung delicately by nails in the gallery) so users can fit even incorrectly sized panes into torn openings. In the wall text we learn that over 2,000 PVC windows have been sourced, documented, and donated. Even basic habitation, then, can and should be the realm of an activist designer. We see through the shattered glass how quickly a home can be made and unmade.

There is no question that the work on display is not in the realm of art. It’s urgent in its actionability, and it demands the faculties of a designer. A plaque of wall text on the lower level asserts, oddly defiantly:

We hope to remind the world of the fundamental purpose of architecture and to expand the vision of the architect’s role in society—something that should continue even in a society without war.

This, Constructing Hope: Ukraine does extremely well. In a moment when the world is grappling with an intense housing shortage, it’s inspiring to see how much can be done with so little—both material and time. The window shipments and how-to manuals of the BRDA team show how products with small defects don’t have to be destined for landfill. Constructing Hope also shows how old buildings, previously underused or abandoned, can and should be reappropriated. In this way they live again.

Lebbeus Woods wrote of the “scabs” of war left on cities after the Bosnian War, and took these gashes as inspiration to conceptualize groundbreaking spaces and forms that still resonate today. His Berlin Free-Zone, published in 1990, didn’t just paint a pretty picture, but engendered a feeling of autonomy in a world so molded by the hand of capital. Today it’s hard to remember, metaphorically, a time when a community came together to get things done without the cause of profit. “After the misuse of the idea of the ‘collective’ during the Soviet period … the process of commoning is being reinvented through action,” the show’s curators write.

Today, we are witnessing an unprecedented turn toward practice and its material impacts in architecture. This show should activate New York. What the grassroots Ukrainian collectives and organizations have accomplished through coordinated community effort hasn’t required a heavy lean on state funding, public-private partnerships, nor the grace of a benevolent client. Although emerging from singular wartime conditions of scarcity and urgency, the show’s curation, its directive to construct hope, and its objects on display remind us of a collective spirit, a bygone era of American activist design. Owen Hatherley describes this as a “useable past” in his new book, Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects (Repeater Books, 2024). For designers hoping to construct a different, community-oriented world, Ukraine’s contemporary designers present a transferrable, usable model of (re)building together. Even in a society without war, what could toloka, or “the Ukrainian tradition of working together to address urgent community needs,” look like here?

What might survive the night as a memory is kept alive in an oberih, is shared in a cardboard model, is nourished behind a paper partition. But it’s the action of building that sees it materially reconstructed. We do construct hope with mismatched windows and memory. Constructing Hope reminds us there’s a better way to rebuild, and rather than see the war in Ukraine as a distant catastrophe, we may actually take notes for our own neighborhoods.