PRAGMATIKA.MEDIA in collaboration with Ukrainian Design and Innovation Week on October 18-19 organized Design & Architecture Summit, which covered not only the topics of architecture and design, but also the development of the urban environment. The Ukrainian urban planner and founder of Restart Agency talked about how to work with the industrial heritage of Ukrainian cities in the context of the war in his report Oleksandr Shevchenko. The architect of the New York studio became the main speaker within this issue Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) Modi's pen — she showed how modern approaches to the reuse of heritage work, using the example of the renovation project of the Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn. Read the main theses of the speakers in the material.
Think about the context: why renovation is impossible without reference to the present
By the concept of "urban landscape" we do not mean natural landscapes, but the urban environment with all its positive and negative processes - gentrification, rapid development, accumulation of architectural layers, destruction of historical and industrial monuments. War and, as a result, dynamic internal migration only accelerate the transformation of urban space, increasing the number of challenges facing architects and municipalities. In our case (in the Ukrainian context), it is impossible to consider work with the urban landscape separately from the challenges of a full-scale war.
Urbanist, founder of Restart Agency Oleksandr Shevchenko
This opinion became the main thesis of the report of Oleksandr Shevchenko, a Ukrainian urbanist and specialist in spatial development, who tried to investigate how the context of war affects the evolution of urban space. In 2022, Shevchenko founded the agency Restart Agency, which focuses on working with war-affected communities. Oleksandr's team is convinced that it is necessary to rebuild Ukrainian cities now, without waiting for the end of hostilities, because it is much more important to preserve communities, and not conventional architectural environment: this is how we unite people and prevent even greater population migration. Restart Agency developed recovery projects for Voznesensk (Mykolaiv Oblast) and Melitopol (Zaporizh Oblast), rethinking in these programs, in particular, the industrial component.
Restart Agency team. The agency is convinced that it is necessary to rebuild Ukrainian cities right now, without waiting for the end of hostilities. Photo source: Restart Agency
In her report, Shevchenko recalls the chronology of industrial revolutions and reflects on the historical prerequisites that led to the localization of large-scale industrial production in European cities. "Why did we have large factories and plants in the center of the city? Because this is how the economy of Europe worked two hundred years ago, before the first industrial revolution: cities were centers of production and accumulated all capacities where it was convenient. Raw materials arrived at the port, they worked with them here and there, there was no need to go anywhere. So when we talk about reuse, we should take two steps back and remember what "use" was, "says Shevchenko.
Oleksandr Shevchenko: "How is it possible, reinterpreting an object during the war, to give it an additional dimension? Do you want to fly a high-rise instead of him? This is the wrong answer, because the number of challenges facing our cities and communities today has increased many times over."
At the border of the first and second industrial revolutions, when the automation of production appeared, factories from urban centers began to migrate to places with cheaper labor. Ultimately, the third and fourth industrial revolutions finally relocated production in Europe outside the city limits, thus initiating industrial parks. So, in transforming industrial heritage, we must first understand the context in which it functioned and how it affected the community.
Metallurgical plant "Azovstal" in Mariupol under fire in April 2022. Photo source: Army-Inform portal
Secondly, Oleksandr reminds us, today we cannot talk about the reuse of industrial heritage outside the context of war (as architects abroad can do). "No improvement in a city or a community can be considered in isolation from a full-scale war and its impact on us," Shevchenko says and emphasizes that before working with the architectural or functional aspect of renovation, we must think about how to adapt heritage to modern challenges.
"How is it possible, rethinking some object during the war, to give it an additional dimension? Do you want to fly a high-rise instead of him? This is the wrong answer, because the number of challenges facing our cities and communities today has increased many times. The Ukrainian context consists in thinking in many different vectors, taking care, in particular, of the security infrastructure," Shevchenko said.
Oleksandr Shevchenko: "No improvement in the city or community can be considered in isolation from a full-scale war"
For example, he suggested considering inactive industrial buildings as potential spaces for multifunctional shelter systems. According to Shevchenko, they can become an alternative to storage facilities in underground parking lots. But we can't just start building a shelter in the first abandoned building. Even within such a process, participation and research into the needs of residents is required. It is necessary to find out where people spend time in the city, what they do, what kind of relationship they have with this or that building: "That is, without this information, there are a million ways to design a space that is not the way people living in a particular city need it. It's the same with heritage: when we think only of spot improvements on one building, we go out of context and fail to grasp the whole issue. Therefore, the solutions may not be so deep and not so apt."
Promprylad.Renovation — renovation project of the old "Promprylad" plant in Ivano-Frankivsk. The authors of the renovation preserved the Soviet monumental art on the facade. Photo source: Promprylad.Renovation
The founder of Restart Agency calls Promprylad.Renovation — the transformation of the "Promprylad" plant in Ivano-Frankivsk into a multifunctional technological and IT cluster, as well as the Jam Factory Art Center — the renovation of an industrial monument of the 19th century into a modern art center, as successful examples of the reuse of industrial heritage in Ukraine. . Considering the reuse of such large-scale and complex objects as "Azovstal" in Mariupol, Oleksandr Shevchenko once again emphasizes that we should think about meanings, and not the aesthetic component. "Azovstal" needs not only to be restored, but also to give the plant a memorial function.
The memorial cemetery on the seashore near the technical water basins of the Azovstal plant. Visualization: urban coalition ro3kvit
"Of course, the New York cases are beautiful, but the Shepetivka, Konotop, and Okhtyrka cases should be as well. These are cities that today are on the frontier and have a much smaller population, but are an outpost that must continue to function. This, in my opinion, is the truer discourse of reuse in Ukraine. Considering our context, we can give this concept much more than the classic reuse in the world today," Shevchenko summed up.
How it's done in Brooklyn: The renovation of the Domino Sugar factory
Ruchika Modi, director and chief architect of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism studio, joined the summit via video link from New York. The American architect of Indian origin talked about the most famous and most resonant project of the PAU studio — the renovation of the Brooklyn plant Domino Sugar Refinery, which the team completed in 2023. Case immediately attracted the attention of the world architectural community, all leading architectural editorials wrote about him. Its peculiarity is that the architects preserved the historical facade of the plant, placing a modern office center with a glass roof inside. At the same time, the level of intervention in the historical building was minimal, PAU carefully preserved all the authenticity of the 120-year-old plant, built in the Romanesque style.
Renovation of the Brooklyn industrial landmark Domino Sugar Refinery by Practice for Architecture and Urbanism. Photo credit: © Max Touhey
“The Domino Sugar factory is located in a part of Brooklyn that used to be an industrial area, but today it is being transformed into a residential area with public spaces. This plant greatly influenced the development of the city, because it was one of the largest industrial enterprises in New York. Its design was changed several times, the plant survived a large-scale fire at the beginning of the last century, and it was rebuilt, and it continued to function. However, in the 2004st century, everything changed: in 10, the factory was closed because the production was relocated to the Bronx, and the industrial building stood empty for about XNUMX years," says Ruchika Modi.
The director and architect of the Practice for Architecture and Urbanism is Ruchika Modi
After the plant closed, the city sold the site to local developer Isaac Katan and the commercial arm of the Historic Preservation Commission. 3 years later, the city recognized the factory building as a monument of urban architecture to prevent its destruction. Therefore, the architects faced the task of preserving the building of the sugar factory, while at the same time giving it a new function - office and business.
"We have created a unique dialogue between the past and the present. The new stand-alone building allowed us to provide adequate natural lighting and at the same time adhere to standard floor heights for office spaces.” — Ruchika Modi
When PAU started working with this object, it faced a very complex internal structure — it was not adapted for a public function, because it actually served as a shell for industrial equipment. Another problem was the original window openings - they were too small to provide adequate lighting for the workplace. At this stage, the team decided to get all the "inside stuff" of the plant and, in the words of Ruchika, build "a ship in a bottle, or rather a bottle inside a ship" - a completely new 12-story office building with a glass facade.
A view of the Domino Sugar factory from Manhattan. The facade of the historic factory was preserved and restored. Photo courtesy of PAU
"Thus, we created a unique dialogue between the past and the present. We were able to meet all the requirements of preserving the historic facade of the Romanesque building, while creating a new self-contained building inside allowed us to provide adequate natural light while maintaining standard office floor heights. In the end, we created a unique balanced architecture, because the combination of historical facades and the glass dome look great from the outside."
Ruchika Modi joined the summit via video link from New York
The next task facing the architects was to choose the form of the office center that would be placed inside the facade. The PAU team developed 72 models that had a wide variety of configurations — from crystal-like modules to glass "twin towers." In the end, the architects settled on an arched vault. Not only because it provided some flexibility, but also because it resonated with the factory's original appearance. The new building received its own foundation, in addition, it is also attached to the historical facade with the help of special structures. In order to find out whether it is possible to interfere with the historical facade, the architects examined it with the help of laser scanning:
Skyline of Brooklyn and Manhattan and the Domino Sugar Refinery after restoration: the architects kept the facade of the building and placed a glass business center inside. Photo credit: © Max Touhey
"Of course, preservation of the historical facade was one of the main challenges. The first thing we did was examine the brickwork. We studied the thickness of the walls, installation. There was also a laser scan that showed how stable the structure is. This helped us to understand what level of intervention was possible, as we tried to interact with the historic walls as little as possible. The study showed that the brick was sufficiently strong both externally and internally.
Seasonal plants were planted between the walls of the historical monument and the modern office center. Photo credit: © Max Touhey
The new structure is somewhat separated from the historic walls of the factory - this space has been used to maintain proper insolation, on the one hand, and on the other - to arrange vertical gardens of seasonal plants between the two walls. This creates an amazing effect: while in the office, the residents seem to be surrounded by a facade of vegetation. "This is in line with our beliefs about how urban architecture helps to uphold the values of cultural pluralism and adhere to sustainable building principles — so that nature and people exist in harmony," emphasized Ruchika Modi.
