Author Iegeniiva Gubkina’s Architectural Guide Kharkiv is another title on Ukraine’s building tradition. In this 300-pages publication, she argues passionately for the protection of the Constructivist heritage in her hometown. In Kharkiv, the war destroys buildings almost daily – making it difficult to remember Ukraine’s architectural history. A prominent example is the Railway Workers’ Club, which was largely destroyed after two direct attacks in March and most recently in August 2022.
This guide is more than a documentation of the significant buildings in the second largest Ukrainian city. This book is a declaration of love for a city that was exposed to direct combat several times during the Second World War and has been a frontline city since February 2022. Gubkina’s description of Kharkiv is based on the layout of the Janus-faced structure Old Town vs. New Town and Sumska Street connecting the two parts. But the two equal centers do not simply oppose, argue, or resist one another, but are in dialogue, in interaction, in a dialectical relationship. This is not the primitive negation of the old, but the classic unity and struggle of opposites of the old and the new. Or more, it is the completion of the thesis-antithesis model by synthesis. This ambivalence takes on all the more significance against the backdrop of the Russian army’s current war of aggression.
Bilingual in English & Ukranian
Ievgeniia Gubkina, born 1985, architect, researcher and curator. Organised and held numerous conferences. Co-founder of the NGO Urban Forms Center. In 2013 she started the womens avant-garde movement Modernistky. Her research interests include modernist architecture, urban planning and planned cities as well as the heritage of Socialist cities. Currently working on a PhD project on Soviet workers settlements in Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s. Lives and works in Kharkiv.
