Mass Housing in Ukraine: Building Typologies and Catalogue of Series

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 neighborhoods 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 analyze 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.

Chapters:

1922–1938
Ukrainian residential architecture under the early USSR and the Republic of Poland     

Residential courtyard on vul. Stryiska, Lviv 
Tarnavskoho ensemble, Lviv 
Slovo House, Kharkiv
Settlement No. 6, Zaporizhzhia
Kharkiv Tractor Factory, Kharkiv
Zhovtnivka Cooperative, Kyiv
First prefabricated building, Kharkiv

1938–1958
Stalin and the end of Modernism      

Five Modernist apartment buildings, Lviv
Series I-302   
Khreshchatyk, Kyiv
Series 7
Series 11
Sobornyi prospekt, Zaporizhzhia
House with a Spire, Kharkiv
Series I-403
Series I-406

1958–1984
First- and second-generation series under and after Khrushchev

Series I-438
Series I-464A
Series 1-480
Series BK
Series II-57
Series 67
Series 84
Series 87
Series 94
Series 96
Series 121
Series T
Series KT

1984–2008
Late Soviet and early post-Soviet construction

Series APPS 
Series APPS Lux
Postmodernist Podil, Kyiv
Slavutych new town, Slavutych
Cast-in-place towers, Kyiv
Amphiteatr/Amsterdam, Dnipro
Vozdvyzhenka: pseudo-historicism, Kyiv

2008–2022
Turbo-capitalism and urban renaissance 

Residential complexes by Kadorr, Odesa
Karat, residential building, Kharkiv
Residential complexes by Budova, Odesa
Comfort Town, Kyiv
Fayna Town, Kyiv
Municipal housing, Vinnytsia