Ievgenia Gubkina: Charkovský konstruktivismus, ukrajinské arch. dědictví pod ruskou hrozbou

Since the first days of the Russian war against Ukraine, there has been systematic and extensive destruction of architectural heritage, leading to irreversible losses of monuments and cultural heritage. Ievgenia Gubkina, an architecture historian from Kharkiv, will give a lecture on the current situation in Ukraine in terms of monument care. The lecture will take place on Tuesday, April 12, at 6 PM at the Faculty of Architecture of the Czech Technical University in lecture hall 155 – Gočár.

Kharkiv is world-renowned for its interwar modernism, including Soviet-Ukrainian constructivism, of which the main example is the Dzerzhprom building, listed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List. Part of the ensemble is the former government center of Soviet Ukraine, today's Freedom Square with the building of the Kharkiv Regional Administration, whose bombing was captured on video on March 1 and circulated the globe.

"The Russian army is deliberately destroying the historic centers of our cities – ancient Chernihiv, baroque Sumy, classical Kherson and Mykolayiv, historicist Mariupol, and modernist Kharkiv," describes the situation in Ukraine Ievgenia Gubkina, who was forced to leave Kharkiv due to the war and is temporarily living in Lithuania.

Ievgenia Gubkina is a Ukrainian architect, architecture historian, and curator. She is a co-founder of the non-profit organization Urban Forms Center and the feminist group Modernistki. In her work, she focuses on 20th-century architecture and planning in Ukraine, as well as the popularization of Ukrainian architectural heritage. She is the author of publications such as Slavutych: Architectural Guide (2015), Soviet Modernism. Brutalism, Post-Modernism. Buildings and Structures in Ukraine 1955–1991 (2019), among others. In 2020, she contributed as a curator to the multimedia online project Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Architecture.