Being a Ukrainian Architect During Wartime

After more than one year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, thousands of civilians have been killed, and thousands of buildings, heritage sites, and entire cities have been damaged. Along with millions of other Ukrainian women and children, architectural historian Ievgeniia Gubkina had to leave the country, moving further away from the Russian threat in search of safety. Her hometown Kharkiv still remains a target for the Russian army. The war has dramatically changed the geographies of nearly all Ukrainians and returned the work of an architectural critic to the traditional mainstream of journalism.

This shift has taken Gubkina’s thoughts from the academic context and made them more akin to war reporting. This book contains papers presented, printed, or published online by various media in different parts of the world during the first eight months of the all-out war. Most of the texts were written in late spring and summer 2022 after Ievgeniia and her teenage daughter had evacuated to Paris.