The "RE:LIFE UKRAINE" initiative pursues the idea of bringing together students from Ukraine and Europe and utilising their creative potential to compensate for the destruction in Ukraine.
By October 2023, around 170,000 residential buildings with around 2.5 million apartments, 3,400 educational institutions and buildings for health, sport and culture worth around €5.9 billion had been destroyed in eastern Ukraine. Many officials in Ukraine assume that these parts of the country will not be habitable for Ukrainians for the foreseeable future. For this reason, new villages and towns are to be built for the refugees in "safe" parts of the country, particularly in the west. Time is of the essence. Many children are affected, whose personal/individual development should grow up in safe living spaces in order to minimise trauma and give them an optimistic start in life.
The reconstruction of large cities and their infrastructure is secured by national government programmes and international investments. Small communities and rural structures, on the other hand, are in great need of reconstruction, which is not adequately funded. The most important partners of the "RE:LIFE UKRAINE" initiative are the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture Kyiv (NAFAA), the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute (KPE), the Kyiv National University Construction and Architecture (KNUCA), the UdK Berlin, the TU Berlin, the HFT Stuttgart and the National Chamber of Architects of Ukraine.
12 students from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture (NAFAA) traveled from Kyiv with two of their professors to plan and design a residential area for displaced families together with students from the Architecture, Interior Architecture Design and ClimateEngineering courses. It became a reality: 40 families had to flee Bachmut, but were recently able to acquire a "safe" area in the countryside near Kyiv to settle there. The families have lost their "home" and their jobs. Housing is to be built on this land, as well as infrastructure for new businesses - small craft businesses, service providers, cafés, restaurants, etc. An initial cluster as a nucleus for further developments.
During an excursion at the start - a visit was made to müllerblaustein, a timber construction company that plans sustainable buildings made of wood, manufactures the components in the workshop and assembles them on the construction site - the students were able to make initial contacts, get to know each other and then form multi-professional teams for further work. Over the following days, these teams explored all the relevant topics in greater depth, summarised the results and presented them in an impromptu exhibition on the ground floor of Building 8.
The ClimateEngineering team analysed the area's climate data - in terms of average annual temperature curves, wind conditions, global solar radiation, etc., derived basic options for building planning and developed recommendations for the designers. These included compactness, zoning in the site plan and floor plans, local energy sources and material resources - including cradle to cradle - in order to develop a settlement structure that can be resource-conscious and as energy self-sufficient as possible. The Smart City Solution team analysed people's needs and derived evaluation criteria for new settlement structures. The Architecture and Interior Architecture Design team implemented the above findings in building typologies and floor plan structures as examples so that the design concepts can also become the basis for future agglomerations.
On Thursday evening, the symposium "Holistic Concepts for Future Living Spaces" in the Häfelbox, Bad Canstatt, with a live link to Kyiv, was an academic highlight. Professors from NAFAA and HFT Stuttgart presented their positions on holistic concepts for future living spaces in Ukraine in keynote speeches and reaffirmed the need for such international, academic formats.
The students were led by Prof. Iris Belle, Prof. Volkmar Bleicher, Christoph Claus, Genya Moore, Maria Tokar, Prof. Hanna Oliinyk, Prof. Ralf Petersen and Prof. Diane Ziegler. The interest and commitment of the participants in the workshop was outstanding, which is why further collaborations are already planned, possibly in regular formats. For example, a Bachelor's Thesis by Prof. Ralf Petersen will take up the topic in summer semester 2024.
