ATLAS OF POST-SOVIET ARCHITECTURE TRANSFORMATIONS
ATLAS of post-soviet architecture transformations is a live collection of standart soviet architecture transformations, which appeared after the CEE countries' independence. Majority of standart soviet build every day buildings was and still are being renovated - insulated according energy efficiency priority without spatial humanistic transformation. The idea of ATLAS was born in the first week of the Russian-Ukrainian war, in 2022, when Lithuanian architect and RTW founder G. T. Gylytė was thinking how architects could help Ukraine when the war is over. As an architect herself, who worked with transformations of soviet built typical kindergartens and schools, she thought it would be useful to collect the library of positive transformations of such types and share them with UA. When the RTW team started the collection of buildings, it was thought there would be hundreds of such transformations and surprisingly only 15 cases in the whole region were found! That number says so much of what needs to be done in our near future, - says G.T. Gylytė.
“When the idea of the ATLAS was presented in the first Lviv Urban Forum, it gave a pretty big stir in the architects and authorities communities” shared Anton Kolomyeytsev, chief architect of Lviv and initiator of Lviv Urban Forum (UA).
“The scary number 15 in the atlas of transformations was our motivator to make the pilot school projects in UA. Then Ukraine would lead by example for sister countries of CEE.” says Victoria Titova, CEO of Big City Lab (UA).
“Lithuanian architects and urbanists have very similar experience to Ukraine, so they can feel the local context and specifics much better than other countries and offer urban architectural solutions suitable for Ukrainians”, said Oleg Drozdov, founder of Kharkiv School of Architecture in the first discussion of Rebuild the Wonderful ideas in 2022.
Year: 2022 - 2024
Location: CEE Europe
Type: Research
Status: Completed, but always open to be continued
Lead: G.T. Gylytė
Team: E. Kliučinskaitė, E.Vladimirenko
Financed: self-financed by RTW, partly by LKT