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Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room investigates what
happens to domestic spaces, architecture, and the lives of
urbanites during a socioeconomic upheaval. Kateryna Malaia analyzes
how Soviet and post-Soviet city dwellers, navigating a crisis of
inadequate housing and extreme social disruption between the late
1980s and 2000s, transformed their dwellings as their countries
transformed around them. Soviet infrastructure remained but, in
their domestic spaces, urbanites transitioned to post-Soviet
citizens. The two decades after the collapse of the USSR witnessed
a major urban apartment remodeling boom. Malaia shows how, in the
context of limited residential mobility, those remodeling and
modifying their homes formed new lifestyles defined by increased
spatial privacy. Remodeled interiors served as a material
expression of a social identity above the poverty line, in place of
the outdated Soviet signifiers of well-being. Connecting home
improvement, self-reinvention, the end of state socialism, and the
lived experience of change, Malaia puts together a comprehensive
portrait of the era. Malaia shows both the stubborn continuities
and the dramatic changes that accompanied the collapse of the USSR.
Making the case for similarities throughout the former Soviet
empire, this study is based on interviews and fieldwork done
primarily in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine. Many of the buildings
described are similar to those damaged or destroyed by Russian
bombings or artillery fire following the invasion of Ukraine on
February 24, 2022. A book about major historic events written
through the lens of everyday life, Taking Soviet Union Apart is
also about the meaning of home in a dramatically changing world.
Housing is the most omnipresent urban typology. Housing is also the
essential architecture of the human condition. Perhaps more than
any other architectural species, housing determines the ways
urbanites construct their lives and build their shared futures. The
all-out war in Ukraine, started by the Russian Federation in 2022
has disproportionally affected housing and residential
infrastructure. The destruction is so targeted, and the damage so
significant that it has disfigured entire neighbourhoods and erased
entire cities. With the scale of damage and loss in mind, and the
future wide-ranging reconstruction that will inevitably take place
after the war, this study examines the history and typologies of
mass housing in Ukraine. It does so in order to evaluate what is
lost, explain the diversity of modes of urban living that exist in
Ukrainian cities, and finally, reconsider the narrative of how
Ukrainian housing came about. The study covers the period of the
last 100 years: the time of the most dramatic expansion and change
in character of Ukrainian cities. It begins with the experimental
buildings constructed in the Soviet Central and Eastern Ukraine and
Polish Western Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, continues by looking
at type projects from the Stalin era, as well as the serial
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. With the help of archival
materials--texts, blueprints, and photographs--as well as
contemporary documentation, the authors analyse 30 examples of
Ukrainian-designed or modified housing types. Through uncovering
the Ukrainian context, as well as the work of Ukrainian architects,
design institutions, contractors, and developers, the history of
Ukrainian housing is emancipated from the Russian narrative of the
Soviet past. By doing so, we aim to write the 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.
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