Mass Housing in Ukraine

Housing, the most omnipresent urban typology, both reflects social change and is the core of sustainable urban development. This is particularly true in times of war: to a significant extent, a healthy urban environment resists external dangers and destruction. Current day Ukrainian cities are an illustrative example of such resistance, but also of the opportunities for further building up resilience to damage in the residential built environments. This study examines the history and typologies of mass housing in Ukraine. It begins with the experimental buildings constructed in the early Soviet Ukraine, continues by looking at type projects from the Stalin era, as well as the serial type 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. The authors construct a new narrative of housing in Ukraine, one that emancipates itself from the Russia-centric narrative of the Soviet past. They aim to write 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.