Ukrainian Modernism: a timely but bittersweet survey of the country’s best modern buildings

In recent years, the architectural excavation of former Soviet satellites (and their Soviet brutalist architecture) has become something of a mini-industry. Rising in parallel with the reassessment of brutalist architecture as an overall genre, this Eastern European strand of modernist architecture was somehow more authentic and less riven with nostalgia. For a start, many of these buildings were still in use, somehow maintaining their heroic stature and highly crafted grandiosity despite the shifting political sands around them.

In contrast, the image of Western brutalism flipped from guilty pleasure to the throwaway subject of Insta posts, tea towels and limited-edition silkscreen art in the space of a decade. Scarcely a consideration was given to the loss of public amenity and social aspiration represented by the architecture itself.

Explore the pages of 'Ukrainian Modernism' and the country's rich 20th-century architecture heritage

Hopefully the association between aesthetics and politics will be less cursory in the reception of this new monograph from Fuel. Ukrainian Modernism is a bittersweet pill indeed, freighted as it is by the ongoing offensive war being waged by Russia against the sovereign state of Ukraine. With photographs and texts by Dmytro Soloviov, an architectural tour guide, the book is an essential survey of an overlooked legacy that is very much under threat.

As Owen Hatherley points out in his introduction, it’s not only Russian drones that are threatening this built heritage and the lives of the people who live and work within and near them. Also looming are the rapacious market forces that existed long before the invasion and which have hardly been friendly to large, lumbering monuments to a long-lost welfare state.

With all that in mind, it’s perhaps a little hard to enjoy this monograph in the conventional manner. Soloviov’s photographs ably capture the scale, might and occasional shabbiness of the featured buildings, with a particular focus on the craft, design and artisanal detailing that so often sets these structures apart.

There’s a particular passion for mosaics, whether abstract or heroic, and in buildings like the 1980s-era Chernihiv Palace of Weddings, you can experience how dynamically and eccentrically modernism was to evolve when cut off from the dead hand of the free market.

For armchair explorers and aficionados of the architecturally perverse, Ukrainian Modernism is a fine primer. There are over 120 projects chronicled in its pages, and while we hope as many as possible will survive and ultimately thrive once more, it’s hard to imagine that the Ukrainian people will ever again be able to have fond memories of these inescapable throwbacks to the Soviet era.

'Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine' by Dmytro Soloviov, introduction by Owen Hatherley, Fuel, £26.95 from Fuel-Design.com