Mass Housing in Ukraine: War, Past, Future
Housing is the most ubiquitous urban typology. Housing is also the essential armature of the human condition. Perhaps more than any other architectural types, housing determines how city dwellers construct their lives and build their shared futures. The war of aggression in Ukraine, started by the Russian Federation in 2022, has disproportionately affected the country’s housing and residential infrastructure (Figures 1a, 1b, 1c). The destruction is so targeted against civilian infrastructure and the damage so significant that it has disfigured entire neighborhoods and erased entire cities. The fate of the city of Mariupol on the Azov Sea has become a universal icon signifying loss, death, and murder in war (Figure 2). Mariupol's tragic narrative stands as a stark testament to the horrific consequences of conflict, symbolizing the immense human suffering and widespread destruction that has befallen Ukraine. Its ruins are now etched into the collective memory of the world, serving as a somber reminder of the brutal realities and enduring impact of war on cities and their inhabitants. Yet, the war did not end in Mariupol. Three years after its start, the cities and villages completely destroyed in the Russian invasion are too numerous to list in this short article. Artillery, bombings, drone attacks, and missile launches have not stopped for a single day since February 24, 2022.
Figure 1a. Destroyed homes in Borodianka, Kyiv oblast, August 2022. Oleksandr Burlaka and Philipp Meuser.
Figure 1b. Destroyed homes in Borodianka, Kyiv oblast, August 2022. Oleksandr Burlaka and Philipp Meuser.
Figure 1c. Destroyed homes in Borodianka, Kyiv oblast, August 2022. Oleksandr Burlaka and Philipp Meuser.
Figure 2. A street of Mariupol during the siege of the city in the course of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, March 2022, Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Bearing in mind the scale of this damage and loss as well as the wide-ranging future reconstruction that will occur after the war, we recently co-authored a book, Mass Housing in Ukraine: Building Typologies and Catalogue of Series, to examine the history and the most wide-spread types of housing in contemporary Ukraine. It provides a resource to evaluate what is lost, explain the diversity of modes of urban living in Ukrainian cities, and finally, reconsider the narrative of how Ukrainian housing came about in the first place. Covering the period of the most dramatic expansion and change in the character of Ukrainian cities in the last 100 years, we analyzed 30 examples of Ukrainian-designed or -modified housing types or the so-called series.
Starting under Stalin, but particularly under Khrushchev in the 1950s, Soviet construction adopted a peculiar principle: buildings were designed in “series,” a family of projects that shared similar elements, such as premanufactured slabs, or brick-blocks, stair-blocks, as well as floor plans and facade decoration design (if any decoration was used). In the 1950s, a series consisted of different layouts for entire buildings, for example a six- and a nine-floor variation. In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, a series consisted of a kit of large parts—so-called “block-sections” or “enlarged spatial blocks”—side, central, corner, or even top and bottom parts of the building (Figure 3). These parts could be assembled in a variety of ways depending on site needs and local house-building factory production capacity.
Figure 3. Block-section plans from Series 87 catalogue, 1971–1975. Zabolotnyi State Scientific Library.
The purpose of this complicated system was to reduce the number of elements that had to be prefabricated. Block-sections within the same series would use a prefabricated panel over and over again to reduce the time and labor required to produced them. Reality, of course, proved more chaotic. With each improvement and design change the number of prefabricated elements grew, and the complexity of the prefabricated elements increased. In other words, every time an architect moved an outlet, a sink drain, or a window in one of the block’s apartments, a new mold would have to be made to cast the newly created panel type. Beginning in the 1960s, in an effort to make housing less monotonous, architects designed a variety of different “block-sections.” This increased the number of precast elements in each series to many hundreds. As house-building factories produced molds by welding them together in one permanent configuration, remaking a mold or making new molds was no easy task. The overwhelmed house-building factories would instead pick as few block-sections as possible and build them repeatedly, letting monotony proliferate. Despite these problems, the Soviets faithfully relied on serial construction until the very collapse of the USSR, often producing monotonous cityscapes that to this day conjure up the stereotypical Soviet neighborhoods in the minds of many.
Despite this notorious monotony, the buildings found in serially built neighborhoods are not the same in different cities and different former Soviet republics. More often than not, they were designed by local architects, with local conditions and available materials in mind. This was certainly the case in Ukraine.
What is Mass Housing?
During a visit to Ukraine in August 2022, while walking down a historical street near Lvivska Ploshcha in central Kyiv, as the authors, we got into a heated discussion about what constitutes mass-built housing. At the time we were already doing fieldwork and documenting buildings, the book was more than just a concept, and one would have imagined there would be agreement on something this fundamental. And yet we were arguing, walking past the Streamline Moderne House of Doctors (Budynok Likariv) on Velyka Zhytomyrska Street. Was this building, commonly considered a Kyiv landmark, eligible for inclusion in a book about mass-built housing, considering that it was stylistically representative of its time? Or was it too unique for early Soviet Ukrainian construction to be included in a book about mass production? How about all the other unique Streamline Moderne buildings elsewhere in 1920s Ukraine?
When it comes to mass-built housing, Ukraine is less homogeneous than some of its neighbors. This is because during the twentieth century Ukrainian borders changed more than once. Between 1922 and 1939, the country was separated into two parts governed by two different states: interwar Poland and the USSR (Figures 4a, 4b, 4c). Construction industries in these two parts of Ukraine were differently organized. In the USSR, construction was state-commissioned and -controlled, while in the Polish Republic construction was privately funded. Western Ukraine under Polish rule had residential blocks that followed the general European trend: functionalist, built with reinforced concrete, and possessing formalist, undecorated façades and open courtyards lush with greenery. These buildings are synonymous with the expansion of Lviv in the 1920s and 1930s; they developed on the outskirts of the old Austro-Hungarian city to house the region's growing population. But many similar functionalist approaches were also employed in the USSR, even if the latter lagged behind in reinforced-concrete construction, which did not get up to full speed until the 1950s.
“Despite their notorious monotony, the buildings found in serially built neighborhoods are...more often than not...designed by local architects, with local conditions and available materials in mind.”
Figure 4a. Map of Ukraine during 1922-1939. Soviet annexation of Eastern Galicia and Volhynia during WWII, Amitchell125. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
Figure 4b. Map of Ukraine during 1945-1954. Administrative borders of the Ukranian SSR in 1947, Mr.petruccio, Creative Commons 0 license.
Figure 4c. Map of Ukraine between 1954 and now (not reflecting the Russian land grabs). United Nations map.
Architectural historian Christina Crawford astutely describes the early Soviet building industry as inherently geared toward mass construction because Soviet Communism favored resource saving and speed of production over intellectual property, making design repetition the preferred solution for all construction needs. The Soviet mass-housing construction campaign beginning in the 1950s was based on exactly this principle: designs produced by architects and engineers at central state institutions would be disseminated to appropriate climatic zones throughout the country and then manufactured and built as many times as possible or needed. But this approach already existed in Soviet construction as early as the 1920s, when the builders of Kharkiv Tractor Factory reused, with improvements made “on the hoof,” the blueprints for the tractor factory that had already been designed and produced in Stalingrad.[1] Moreover, starting from the earliest Stalin-era series, most residential construction was based not on bespoke designs, but standardized projects, even if they do not seem to be as identical to one another as the austere Khrushchev-era blocks.
Sharing ideas and blueprints was in the spirit of communism but repetition itself was not an exclusively Soviet practice. Construction is much like any form of mass production—the larger the quantity of the same product that is (re)produced, the more sustainable it is for the manufacturer. This economy of scale is embodied by Polish buildings in Lviv: developed by the same builder, they rose up next to one other, shared façade aesthetics and structural and spatial qualities, and formed a consistent built fabric overall. The same is true for early Soviet cities, where cooperatives attempted to build series of apartment blocks, as in Kyiv Zhovtnivka and Kharkiv Novyi Pobut, or in superblocks such as Slovo House in Kharkiv.
The focus on the construction method instead of specific sites is common in the Soviet series of apartment buildings. It is also equally pervasive in many cases that may seem uniquely designed: post-World-War-II signature Khreshchatyk street in Kyiv, haphazard high-rises, and post-Soviet residential superblocks (Figure 5). Each of these examples features a specific type of repetition. The Stalin-era monumentality of Khreshchatyk closely followed a standardized template at every scale—from the wide setbacks that transformed a commercial street into a monumental promenade, to the stalactite-like high-rises like those in Minsk, Warsaw, Moscow, and even New York that flanked it, to the expressive yet standardized façade decoration elements they featured. Meanwhile, Fayna Town, a contemporary superblock in Kyiv (c. 2016-present), has adopted the global model of the gated community, but its active commercial and residential façades face the streets, and it is architecturally ready to open the block for unlimited public access if gated enclaves ever go out of fashion. Many individually designed post-Soviet high-rises nevertheless share a common construction method: they are precast concrete with designs aimed to maximize the quantity of residential square footage, often at the price of overcrowding adjoining courtyards and streets.
Figure 5. Khreshchatyk, the central street of Kyiv, rebuilt after World War II. Philipp Meuser.
What is Ukrainian about Soviet-built architecture?
Perhaps the best illustration of these regional specifics even in times of the most stubborn monotony is a map from the 1988 book Zhilishchnoe stroitel'stvo v Ukrainskoi SSR [Residential construction in the Ukrainian SSR]. The map illustrates not only the number and locations of house-building factories that manufactured panels and blocks and built apartment buildings but also the wide variety of series these house-building factories had adopted by the late 1980s (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Map of Ukrainian House-Building Factories and the series they manufactured. Inozemtseva et al., Zhilishchnoe Stroitel'stvo v Ukrainskoi SSR.
The designs realized by Ukrainian house-building factories largely came from Ukrainian design institutions. The centralized Soviet system had a hierarchy with Gosstroi—the State Committee of Construction in Moscow—in charge of drafting building codes and approving housing designs. For the design of the series themselves, however, the USSR relied on regional institutions established for each classified climate zone. This was true under Stalin, when predominantly Ukrainian architecture teams worked on the post-World War II reconstruction of Ukrainian cities. It became even more of a reality in the early 1960s, when four regional experimental housing design institutes were established in the USSR, including KyivZNDIEP (Kyiv Scientific and Research Institute for Experimental Design) in Ukraine. In addition, Kyiv NDPI mistobuduvannia (Kyiv Scientific and Research Institute for Urban Planning) was established in 1963. These institutions were responsible for the majority of Ukrainian architectural and planning solutions even when Soviet residential construction was at its most diverse due to the great variety of building series built.
In the 1990s, cast-in-place concrete-frame construction replaced prefabrication, because it was no longer low-price and low-labor construction that mattered, but a distinctive exterior and the flexibility of interior layouts that could be sold to the nouveau-riche post-Soviet clientele. Although the housing market slowly recovered from the economic chaos of the early post-Soviet years, the preference for cast-in-place concrete frame never went away, remaining the dominant method of construction to this day. Yet, many other qualities—the emphasis on infrastructure, the approach to facades and their materiality, the relationship between newly built housing and the street have changed so much that we dedicated two sections of our book to late-Soviet and post-Soviet housing alone.
We did not intend our book to be just an inventory of housing types; we wanted to write a book for Ukraine at war. It is clear there will have to be reconstruction; in fact, reconstruction efforts are already underway. It is also clear that methods of housing design and construction will have to be rethought in the coming years. With destroyed infrastructure and millions of Ukrainians physically and mentally traumatized and displaced in this war, questions of accessibility, equal opportunity, and safety in the built environment would have to be at the forefront of the reconstruction effort.
In addition, knowledge of apartment building typologies matters for reconstruction because the (type of) damage apartment blocks sustained may depend on how they were built. Some of the differences are obvious: buildings with load-bearing structures made of brick are more at risk of total collapse than those with walls made from cast-in-place concrete. Other differences only become apparent when we know the characteristics of a specific apartment series. For instance, some Soviet series of precast concrete housing were built using only transverse interior load-bearing walls (Series 121, for example), while others, such as Series I-480, have exterior load-bearing panels that put a building's structural integrity more at risk when hit by drone or missile debris.
As authors, we understand that this publication will not end this war. However, if we can ensure that this war and its damage is not forgotten, perhaps we will have made a contribution.
Citation
Kateryna Malaia and Philipp Meuser, “Mass Housing in Ukraine: War, Past, Future,” PLATFORM, February 24, 2025.
Notes
[1] Christina Crawford, Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2022), 243–247.
