Ievgeniia Gubkina Livres

Slavutych, a Ukrainian provincial city north of Kiev, seems in many respects to belong to a different era. Built after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 to replace the contaminated dwellings of workers from the plant, Slavutych is the last "ideal" planned city of the Soviet Union. The city is highly topical, particularly in times of political crisis in Eastern Europe. However, Slavutych is also an architectural manifestation of the Soviet people's friendship, with architects throughout the Soviet Union involved in its planning and construction. Postmodern buildings in Slavutych are both characterised by socialist, Soviet influences and regional styles from the Caucasus region, Baltic States and Russia. Furthermore, the search for an environmentally sustainable, habitable architecture is of course still relevant today. The Architectural Guide Slavutych documents numerous buildings as well as all city districts, providing a critical analysis of unique late-Soviet architecture and urban planning in the context of Perestroika.

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 archi-tec-tural 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.