The last days of August used to smell of dust, warm cardboard and new school clothes.

When I was a child, my parents took me to Obiednanyi2, a market in the Proletarskyi district of Donetsk3, where I grew up. We went there to buy what September required. Trousers, shirts, shoes, perhaps a jumper with enough room for the child I was expected to become before winter.

The fitting room was a square of cardboard placed on the ground.

I stood on it in my underwear while strangers walked past and adults discussed whether the trousers would survive another growth spurt. My main concern was not price, fabric or even dignity. I prayed that none of my classmates would appear. There are many ways to begin a school year. Mine began with public exposure and the hope that everyone I knew had chosen a different market.

There is something special about these final days of August. The air has not yet accepted autumn, but the calendar has already begun clearing its throat. Even now, long after school has finished with me, I feel that a new term is approaching and that I have forgotten to complete something important.

This Sunday was a working day, although I wanted to enjoy what remained of the summer. A laptop makes it possible to work almost anywhere, which is a promise made by technology companies that rarely mention sand entering the keyboard.

I took mine to a beach beside the Dnipro4.

The sky occupied nearly the whole view, a vast, hard blue with no interest in our deadlines. Below it, Podil5 stretched along the opposite bank in a thin architectural section. Pale buildings stood shoulder to shoulder beneath the green hills. The river was dark blue and restless.

From where I lay, the city looked carefully arranged and strangely distant, as though Kyiv had become a model I could study without being asked to solve it.

The sand was cool after a downpour during the night. It held the record of everyone who had arrived before me. Bare feet, shoes, dogs and birds had crossed it in different directions. The wind combed some of the marks away and left others sharply defined. This seemed fair. Cities do much the same thing with memory.

There were few people, perhaps because of the rain. A woman near the water laughed uncontrollably into her telephone. I could not hear the joke, only the bright rhythm of her laughter travelling across the beach. To my left, several athletic men with tattoos lay in the sun with the solemn concentration of people completing an important civic duty. A couple stood waist-deep in the river, holding themselves still while their bodies negotiated with the temperature.

A grandmother led her granddaughter towards the wet sand. The child moved with the certainty that mud is a material worth investigating. Some men carrying fishing rods walked back along the shore. An elderly man slept in the shade beneath a tree. A crow inspected the ground near my blanket with professional seriousness. It may have been searching for the crisps I had spilled. I would prefer to say that I was feeding the local wildlife, but the truth is that I am simply not very competent at eating crisps in strong wind.

I put on some Italo disco6. During breaks, my friend and I played cards. Not strip poker. The beach already had its own dress code. I only hoped that the reflection in my sunglasses did not reveal the cards in my hand.

I lay face down on the blanket with my elbows pressed into the sand and the laptop in front of me. My shoes had been abandoned nearby, which gave the scene the appearance of a very relaxed office evacuation. The wind lifted grains of sand into my face and across the screen. I continued working because architects are trained to treat unsuitable conditions as a design challenge, especially when admitting defeat would require putting our shoes back on.

The view should have encouraged me to rest. Instead, it made me think about school.

Perhaps it was the date. Perhaps it was the child beside the water. Perhaps the empty beach had become a kind of classroom, with the river as its blackboard and the city waiting on the other side for an answer.

Let us be children today. Not children who know nothing, but children who have not stopped imagining because they have encountered reality.

Reality often makes people so grounded that they forget the ground itself was arranged by somebody. Rules were made by people. Buildings were designed by people. Institutions were invented by people. We are people too, which means we are allowed to ask whether another arrangement might work better.

Let us imagine that buildings are alive. Let us allow them to speak.

What would the Friedrich Michelson7 building at 12 Kotsiubynskoho Street8 say if it could write to Kyiv?

The last time I took you there, I led you through a dark entrance, past peeling paint and collapsed plaster, into rooms whose proportions still suggested dignity even when their floors were buried beneath rubbish. I asked you to look upwards, because the ceilings still carried extraordinary stucco work. I also asked you to look down, because beauty is of limited use if the next step does not exist.

I entered after meeting the man I call the Spirit of the Basement. Our acquaintance began beside the building with cats and cigarettes. He had spent years watching over the place, protecting what remained from people who regarded abandoned architecture as a free catalogue of doors, metal, timber and ornament. He guided me inside, through corridors where light arrived in narrow strips and every footstep required negotiation.

Once we know the way, perhaps the building itself can guide us further.

When I studied the interiors, I imagined children answering questions at a blackboard, sitting at their desks and running towards the canteen before the hot pizza disappeared. Yes, Ukrainian schools sell handmade pizza. It was once my favourite school food and remains one of the strongest arguments for education.

But I do not think this building should simply imitate the school it once was. Restoration should not be an act of arranging history behind glass. A building returns to life only when people need what happens inside it.

What kind of place could this become now?

A school, perhaps, but not only for children. A school of the living city.

Among the people I know are architects, artists, musicians, researchers and organisers, many between twenty-five and forty. They are ambitious, talented and frequently exhausted. Each has knowledge that rarely appears in textbooks, because it was learned while persuading a contractor, organising an exhibition, finding an archive document, repairing a mistake or completing work under conditions that the original brief failed to imagine.

At university, we are taught principles. At work, somebody eventually tells us to forget everything we learned because it no longer works. This is both insulting and occasionally true. What is missing is the place between those two sentences, somewhere knowledge can be tested, challenged and passed from one person to another without pretending that anyone has finished learning.

I imagine rooms where a conservation architect explains how to read layers of paint, then listens while a craftsperson explains why the proposed repair will fail. A musician might speak about acoustics in a room whose ceiling has been silent for decades. A historian could bring an archive photograph, while a student makes a measured drawing and a neighbour adds the detail that no archive recorded.

The building could teach through its own wounds. Its brick, timber, plaster, fire damage and improvised alterations could become evidence. Learning would not happen beside the restoration. The restoration itself would be part of the learning.

Education is impossible without culture. Culture is impossible without community. Community is impossible if every decision arrives already completed.

Last Saturday, six people gathered around the old oak table that came from the basement. Nobody planned to establish an institution. We ate, spoke about Kyiv’s architecture, looked through archive photographs, listened to new music and raised money for a mobile workshop. Knowledge moved around the table without asking who was qualified to own it.

If six people around one damaged table can create a community for an evening, I find it difficult not to wonder what four thousand square metres might do.

Then the architect in me interrupts the child.

Imagination is necessary, but it is not permission. Enthusiasm is not a structural survey. A beautiful intention cannot certify a staircase, stabilise a ceiling or clarify ownership. We do not yet have the authority, the technical evidence, the budget or the agreements required to begin restoring the building. We should not pretend otherwise.

The first step is therefore less theatrical than opening the doors on 1 September9 and inviting everyone inside with brooms. It is also more important.

We need to understand exactly who owns the building, who is responsible for it and what protections apply to it. We need the people with authority to speak to the people with knowledge. A conservation architect, structural engineer, fire engineer, historian, lawyer and community organisers should examine the same evidence before anyone announces a solution.

The existing building must be documented. Archive plans, photographs and memories should be gathered. With written permission, a measured survey and a detailed digital scan could record what remains before more is lost. The building’s structure, materials, services and risks must be assessed. Its two underground levels may offer important possibilities, but nobody should call them a shelter until qualified specialists have examined access, ventilation, fire safety, capacity and the actual protection they could provide.

Only then can an adaptive reuse study compare possible futures. Education may remain the central purpose, but the form could include workshops, studios, lectures, exhibitions, research, archives and public rooms. Some uses may be permanent. Others may be temporary tests. The building should be allowed to teach us what it can support.

Participation should be the heart of the process, but participation does not mean accepting every proposal. It means every serious idea can be considered, and every decision can be explained. Public discussion should begin before the project appears finished. Criticism should not be treated as sabotage. It is one of the materials from which trust is built.

Kyiv already has people who protect historic buildings, conduct research, lead walks, restore details and organise community cleanups. It also has businesses that care about the city and may support work that is careful, transparent and useful. The project should not behave as though it has invented civic concern. It should bring existing knowledge into the same room.

When legal access and professional supervision are secured, a cleanup could become the first visible action. Not a romantic invasion of an unsafe ruin, but a planned day with protective equipment, agreed zones, waste removal and people who know which fragments are rubbish and which are evidence.

One room on the ground floor could eventually become a working workshop for the building itself. Plans, samples, discoveries and questions could be displayed there. As the restoration developed, the public could see not only the polished result but the doubts, revisions and reasons behind it.

Life need not wait until every room is perfect. Once safe and permitted, a small courtyard event, a lecture, a temporary exhibition or a coffee table outside the entrance could test whether people wish to gather around this place. A school begins when attention becomes shared, not when a plaque is fixed to the wall.

I had wanted the first community cleanup to happen around 1 September. The symbolism pleased me. The old school would hear its first bell in a very long time, only this time it would call adults carrying gloves, brooms and ideas rather than children carrying exercise books.

But 1 September is too soon for a cleanup and too important for theatre.

We do not have permission to invite people into the building. We do not yet know enough about its risks. I will not ask anyone to cross an unsafe threshold merely because the metaphor is attractive. Architecture has already suffered enough from people confusing a strong image with a responsible plan.

So perhaps the first bell can be quieter.

It can be this article. It can be the first public conversation held outside the building or online. It can be an invitation to architects, engineers, historians, former pupils, neighbours, cultural workers and city officials to tell us what they know, what they fear and what they imagine.

Before we can return a school to the building, we must build the community capable of caring for it.

On the beach, the afternoon continued without requiring a conclusion. The woman finished her telephone call. The couple moved further into the water. The crow came closer to the blanket and found at least one crisp, proving that persistence occasionally produces measurable results.

Across the river, Kyiv remained stretched beneath the enormous blue sky. From this distance, its arguments were invisible. Buildings became lines, windows became rhythm and difficult questions became temporarily well composed.

I looked at the laptop, then at the sand caught between the keys.

When I was a child in Donetsk, I stood on cardboard in my underwear and prayed that nobody from school would see me. I thought education began with the correct trousers and the avoidance of humiliation.

Now I lie on a beach in Kyiv and think that learning may begin somewhere else. It may begin when adults allow themselves to become children again, not through innocence, but through courage. The courage to imagine before the answer is certain. The courage to make a proposal that may change. The courage to admit when a window, a rule or an entire plan does not work, and to repair it.

I am not inviting you into a finished project. I am inviting you into the question.

What kind of school does a city need when its most useful knowledge is scattered among the people already living there? What can an old building teach us before we decide what to place inside it? How do we restore dignity without turning history into decoration? And who must gather around the table before the first drawing is made?

The first bell has not rung yet.

But somewhere between the crow, the laptop, the memory of cardboard and the old house waiting behind its damaged doors, I think I heard someone lifting it.

I had come to photograph the facades at 12 Mykhaila Kotsiubynskoho Street. The man and I began talking, and something inside me suggested that I offer him a cigarette. This remains an unofficial but remarkably effective method of architectural access in Kyiv. For now, I shall call him the Spirit of the Basement.

He told me that he had lived below the building for more than ten years, protecting it from looters and watching over what remained. After we had smoked and discussed architecture, local history and the rather flexible relationship between ownership and responsibility, he led me inside.

Come with me, but mind your feet.

The entrance was narrow, dark and crowded with discarded boards and boxes. Paint hung from the walls in brittle curls. Above us, however, was a ceiling of astonishing delicacy. Mirrored pieces, painted ornament, deep blue borders and a large floral centre had survived while everything beneath them appeared to be resigning.

This building immediately gave me two instructions. Look up, because beauty remains there. Look down, because the floor may not.

The deeper we went, the more those two instructions became necessary. Tall rooms opened one after another. Sunlight entered through dirty windows and revealed every particle of dust. Herringbone parquet remained beneath fallen plaster. Old doors leaned away from their frames. Cornices ran around the rooms in intricate bands, interrupted by cracks, missing sections and the occasional cable installed with all the sensitivity of a drunk surgeon.

Some ceilings held plaster rosettes and delicate geometric borders. Others had been hidden beneath perforated acoustic panels and fluorescent lights. Each period had added its own layer, and not every layer had been particularly courteous to the one before it. An architect could read the building almost like a section drawing. Original ornament, institutional adaptation, hurried repair, abandonment, vandalism and fire were all visible at once.

Then we reached the burned rooms.

The atmosphere changed before the space did. The air smelled darker. Doorways were blackened, cornices had been scorched and timber beams had become charcoal. In one room, part of the ceiling and floor above had disappeared completely. Timber laths remained exposed around the opening like the ribs of the building. Daylight entered from somewhere it had never been invited to enter.

I moved carefully across the debris. There were broken bricks, fragments of plaster ornament, lengths of timber and pieces of ceiling lying where people had once walked. In one room, I found part of a decorative moulding on the floor. Elsewhere, a broken chandelier lay among old papers, perforated panels and dust. These were not treasures displayed behind museum glass. They were objects waiting to be damaged again.

The building is more than four thousand square metres and is recognised as a local monument of architecture and history. It was built between 1899 and 1902 in a mixture of historicism, Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Romanesque language. Yet its importance is not contained only in its facade. Its real story concerns education, social ambition and the people who once believed that a building could help a child discover what kind of mind he possessed.

The man behind its construction was Friedrich Michelson, a Baltic German entrepreneur who became one of Kyiv’s most influential property owners. He controlled brickworks, glass production, construction and the management of buildings across the city. His properties contained homes, shops, offices, schools, hotels and public baths. People described his holdings as a city within the city, which is an impressive achievement for a man later mocked because he rarely spoke during meetings of the Kyiv City Duma.

Perhaps he believed buildings were sufficiently noisy on his behalf.

This particular building was created for the private school founded by Gottlieb Walker, an educator trained in Leipzig. At the end of the nineteenth century, Ukraine had a severe shortage of schools. One historical account records only 198,300 pupils in secondary general and specialist institutions across the whole country in the 1914 and 1915 school year. Today, Kyiv alone has more than 298,000 schoolchildren. The categories and borders are not directly comparable, but the contrast still tells us how restricted education once was.

Russia has not attacked only the buildings in which children learn. By February 2025, UNICEF reported that at least 2,520 children had been killed or injured since the full-scale invasion began. The figure includes children of all ages, not schoolchildren alone, and the true number is likely far higher. Standing inside a former school, I cannot read this as arithmetic. I see empty places at desks, lessons interrupted by sirens and a generation taught the route to a shelter before it has had enough time to discover the city outside.

Walker wanted to offer something different. He rejected the barracks-like discipline common in many schools and accepted boys from families without much money. This earned his gymnasium the dismissive nickname of the school for urchins. History has a mischievous sense of humour, because several of those supposed urchins became rather difficult to dismiss.

The building is connected with the sculptor Alexander Archipenko, the artist and filmmaker Ivan Kavaleridze, the scientist Volodymyr Symyrenko and the composer Levko Revutsky. Its teachers included distinguished geologists, historians, ethnographers and literary scholars. Walker combined a classical gymnasium with a practical school so that pupils could move between them as their abilities became clearer. It was an early attempt to design education around children, rather than forcing every child into the same intellectual room and blaming him when the furniture did not fit.

The building also carries the memory of Volodymyr Horowitz. His family rented an apartment here, and he later studied in the building. He did not receive the certificates that institutions usually consider essential. This inconvenience failed to prevent him from becoming one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century.

While researching, I found his 1978 concert at the White House and listened to him play Chopin. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter sat in the front row while Horowitz made the piano seem larger than the room containing it. When he played the Funeral March, I began thinking about the music as space. The listener stands in the centre while death moves around him, approaching through the crescendo and retreating through the diminuendo. This is the difficulty with being an architect. Even death eventually receives a circulation plan.

The building continued changing after the schools moved deeper into the courtyard. It housed railway auditors, institutions of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, offices under the Hetman government, Soviet ministries and later organisations connected with legal reform in independent Ukraine. Every political system found a use for these rooms. None appears to have found a permanent method of caring for them.

In 2012, the building was sold at auction to a private company, reportedly for a price well below its market value. The company entered termination proceedings the following year. Permission was later granted for reconstruction of part of the premises, yet the building continued to decay. Its legal biography is almost as layered as its plaster, although considerably less attractive.

Standing inside, I kept thinking about the difference between age and neglect. Age softens timber, wears a stair and records the touch of hands. Neglect allows water through a roof, fire through a room and people with crowbars through a doorway. One creates patina. The other creates absence.

Before I left, the Spirit showed me an old oak table in his basement1. He said it had been given to him by a grandson of Borys Paton and that the great Ukrainian engineer had worked at it. I cannot yet verify the complete provenance, so I hold it as a story entrusted to me while I look for documents.

The table had a veneered top, carved legs and decades of dampness in its surface. It was cracked, swollen and uneven. Naturally, I wanted it.

“What would you like for it?” I asked.

“A mobile telephone with internet access, so that I can continue my research,” he replied.

The next morning, I returned with a working touchscreen telephone. We exchanged the telephone for the table and marked the transaction with another cigarette. Lawyers may find this insufficient. The Spirit and I considered the matter settled.

Only the sections of the tabletop fitted into my friend’s Lanos. The solid oak base had to be carried home by hand. We moved through Kyiv from one patch of shade to another, because it was extremely hot and oak shows very little sympathy towards optimism. A journey of ten minutes became a study in trees, shadows and lower back pain.

We celebrated beneath my building with khinkali and khachapuri. Then the Spirit went away to explore his new telephone, and I went upstairs to clean the table.

A few days later, it stood in my kitchen and living room. Its central panel had survived the dampness better than the rest, so my computer mouse now lives there while the surrounding veneer behaves like a small wooden sea. The table became my desk, then a dining table, then a lecture hall.

On Saturday, friends gathered around it for tuna pasta, wine and a conversation about Kyiv’s architecture. We raised money for a mobile workshop supporting Ukrainian defenders. I showed archive photographs, spoke about the city’s buildings and played my new piano composition. My guests stayed until half an hour before curfew, which is the Kyiv equivalent of receiving a highly favourable review.

That evening, the old table carried food, drawings, music, historical research and the beginnings of new friendships. A week earlier, it had been waiting in a damp basement. Now it had become the first piece of furniture for what I hope will grow into Maisternia Connections, a community where people can share work, challenge ideas and occasionally disagree over pasta.

The abandoned building and the rescued table now occupy the same place in my mind. Both have survived several lives. Both carry damage without having lost their value. The difference is that somebody gave the table another purpose.

The building is still waiting.

It reminds me that someone beyond Ukraine wants me to breathe, sip a coffee and keep stitching letters into words, and words into stories that need to be told.

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Hi, you may have noticed that I failed to appear in your inbox this morning.

Kyiv had several Russian rockets to receive, an appointment nobody had put in the diary, so I welcomed them in the traditional manner, with a cup of tea and a considerable amount of shock.

Once the city had settled, I returned to my Monday architectural work and used the pauses between drawings to stitch a few letters into words, and the words into the story I had promised you for every Monday.

Today is also my final day at work, which means that my job and the conscription deferment attached to it are ending together. From tomorrow, I shall be unemployed until I find my next position, and rather more visible to the military bureaucracy than one generally hopes to be.

Apparently, rockets, redundancy and conscription paperwork have formed a small committee to organise my week. Their planning is impressive, although I dislike the brief.

So I am a little late, slightly shaken and still negotiating with the kettle, but I am here. Between my final drawings, an uncertain tomorrow and the occasional unwanted object crossing Kyiv’s airspace, I am doing my best to keep telling you what life and architecture look like from inside the city.

Before you continue, please pause for a moment and inspect the graphic below. There I am, sitting at my old oak table with tea, architectural drawings and a kettle that appears more emotionally stable than its owner, while Kyiv deals with another morning of aerial interruptions. Once you have confirmed that the table is still standing and the architect remains broadly operational, scroll down. I will tell you how my week began with rockets, wandered through cats, basements, an antique table, Georgian food, friendship and a dinner party, and ended on a Monday with no job, no conscription deferment and, rather heroically, some tea still left in the cup.

At 7.30 this morning, an air raid alert lasted for eleven minutes, which was almost exactly enough time for me to clean my teeth and make tea.

Kyiv has developed an alarming talent for fitting war into the domestic timetable.

Today, however, I want to tell you about the things that inspired me and lifted my spirits during the past week. There will still be an air raid, naturally. This is Kyiv, and apparently no story is permitted to begin without one. But there will also be an antique table, several cats, a mysterious guardian of a basement, khinkali, music, friendship and rather more pasta than architectural journalism usually requires.

When I was a child, long before I suspected that architecture and interior design would become my profession, I spent my weekends rearranging the furniture in my bedroom.

Other children may have rested. I conducted ergonomic experiments.

Each arrangement suggested another possibility. Moving the bed changed the relationship with the window. Moving the desk altered the light. A chair placed in one corner created somewhere to read, while the same chair placed elsewhere became an obstacle that attacked my shin after dark.

I once dismantled my chair-bed completely. I threw away its main structure and kept only three upholstered sections with wooden frames. I did not yet know that modular sofas existed, but ignorance did not prevent me from attempting to invent one.

I placed the sections in a line when I wanted to lie down. I raised one section to form a backrest when I wanted to read beneath the window. I stacked them when I needed another seat.

The furniture changed according to the life I wanted the room to support.

I now understand that these rearrangements were partly design exercises and partly a form of psychological care. Whenever something changed inside me, I changed the room around me. Sometimes the transformation began with a feeling. Sometimes it began because a computer or a new table arrived and demanded territory.

Last week, those childhood memories returned while I was rearranging my kitchen and living room.

The room has acquired a new zone, a study.

I placed it close to the balcony doors, partly because the light is good and partly because I frequently go onto the balcony to smoke. A responsible architect might have designed the study around concentration and productivity. I appear to have designed mine around efficient access to cigarettes.

No study is possible without a desk, and this particular desk was the reason the entire room had to change.

It is an old oak table with a veneered top and substantial carved legs. It is already several decades old, perhaps more. A central section can be removed to shorten it or inserted when more space is needed.

I kept the central section in place because it now performs an additional and unexpectedly precious function. It is flat.

The table had spent years in a damp room. Moisture had cracked the veneer and raised parts of the surface into waves. Using a computer mouse across it feels rather like navigating a small boat through rough water.

The central panel survived in better condition. My mouse now occupies that narrow territory of stability while the rest of the desk waits to be restored.

Its imperfections do not annoy me. They reveal what happened to it. The cracks record dampness, neglect and time. Restoration should not erase that history completely. It should make the table useful again without forcing it to pretend that nothing happened.

That is a question Ukraine will face repeatedly in the years ahead.

How do we repair what has been damaged without removing the evidence of what it survived?

The story of how this table entered my flat began on Tuesday morning, after another massive Russian attack during the night.

I went for a walk through Kyiv. I wanted coffee, a conversation with my mother on the telephone and several photographs of the facade of a building I am researching.

Near the building, I met a man feeding the local cats.

Something inside me suggested that I offer him a cigarette. I did, and for the purposes of this story I will call him the Spirit of the Basement.

He told me that he had lived in the basement for more than ten years, protecting the historic building from looters and watching over its remaining fabric.

Our acquaintance began with cats and cigarettes, which is not the conventional procedure for architectural research but has often proved more effective than an appointment request.

We spoke about the neglected building, Kyiv’s history, architecture and various social initiatives. Several hours later, I was sitting inside his basement and talking with him about life and the Friedrich Michelson apartment building1.

Then he showed me what he called an artefact.

It was the oak table.

He told me that it had been given to him by a grandson of Borys Paton and that Paton had once worked at it. Borys Paton was a Ukrainian engineer, materials scientist and one of the country’s most important organisers of scientific research.

I cannot yet verify the table’s complete provenance, so for now I hold the account as a story entrusted to me, waiting for documents to catch up.

Still, I was captivated.

Perhaps it was the history attached to it. Perhaps it was the carved oak beneath the damaged veneer. Perhaps I simply recognised another object that had survived long enough to deserve a second life.

I asked the Spirit what he intended to do with it.

He said he hoped to organise an auction.

“What would you like for it?” I asked.

“I need a mobile telephone with internet access, so that I can continue my research,” he replied.

“All right. Let us meet tomorrow before lunch. I will bring you one.”

At 11.45 on Wednesday morning, I arrived at the agreed place holding a working touchscreen telephone.

I gave it to the Spirit.

Instead of signing a contract of sale, we smoked a cigarette together.

This may not satisfy every lawyer, but it was concise, mutually understood and required considerably less paperwork than most architectural agreements.

I asked a friend to help transport the table to my flat. Only the sections of the tabletop fitted inside his Lanos. The lower structure, made from solid oak, had to be carried by hand.

Fortunately, I live about ten minutes away.

Unfortunately, oak does not become lighter simply because the destination is nearby.

The Spirit offered to help. We lifted the base and began carrying it towards my home in short bursts. The heat was extraordinary. We moved from the shade of one tree to the next, resting beneath each crown before continuing.

For those few minutes, the city revealed another kind of architecture.

The route was not measured in metres. It was measured in shadows.

Beneath my building is a Georgian restaurant, so I suggested that we celebrate the acquisition with khinkali2 and khachapuri3.

After lunch, we returned to our separate tasks. The Spirit went to acquaint himself with his new telephone. I went upstairs to begin cleaning several decades of history from my new desk.

By Saturday, the table was ready for company.

On 8 August, I held a dinner at home and invited friends to help raise donations for a mobile workshop that will service weapons used by Ukrainian defenders.

The programme was simple.

I would prepare my signature tuna pasta. We would eat, talk and introduce people who had not met before. Afterwards, I would give a lecture about Kyiv’s historic architecture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using archive images alongside photographs of the buildings as they appear today.

Music by Ukrainian composers from the same period played quietly in the background.

I had not enjoyed a day off so completely for a very long time.

I watched conversations begin at one end of the table and travel to the other. New connections formed between people who had arrived as strangers. My friends listened to the lecture with bright eyes, asked questions, offered corrections and added details that enlarged the story.

This is how knowledge should feel.

It should not be delivered from one person to a silent room. It should move around the table, collect other people’s memories and return richer than it began.

When I told them the story of the table, they were pleasantly astonished. I may even have detected a little good-natured envy in several pairs of eyes.

Architects are trained to observe subtle changes in expression. This is useful when presenting a project and invaluable when showing friends an antique oak table acquired for the price of a telephone.

That evening, I also played them my new piano composition.

The room that had begun the week as a kitchen and living room had become several places at once. It was a dining room, lecture hall, music room, meeting place and temporary fundraising venue.

This is what I mean when I say that architecture is not simply the arrangement of walls.

A room becomes meaningful through what people are able to do inside it.

The dinner must have been successful because my guests remained until 11.30, only half an hour before curfew began.

Nothing brings a Kyiv gathering to an efficient conclusion quite like the knowledge that the entire city is about to become legally unavailable.

After everyone left, the glasses, plates and chairs remained as evidence of the evening. The old table stood at the centre of it all.

A week earlier, it had been in a damp basement. Now it had carried dinner, wine, architectural history, a fundraising effort, new friendships and music.

The table had not merely entered another room. It had recovered its purpose.

That evening helped me understand what I want to build around Maisternia.

I want to gather a proactive intellectual community whose members can grow together, support one another’s interests, share their research and work, challenge ideas honestly and, just as importantly, eat a good dinner with a glass of wine.

Architecture needs such tables.

Cities need places where people can arrive with separate knowledge and leave carrying part of somebody else’s. Ideas need rooms in which they are allowed to remain unfinished, be questioned and gradually acquire form.

This is how Maisternia Connections was born.

It will be a semi-private club built around conversation, curiosity and mutual support. I do not want it to become another room in which people exchange business cards and immediately forget one another. I want it to feel like the dinner did, generous, intelligent, informal and alive.

Perhaps its first piece of furniture has already chosen itself.

This morning, after the eleven-minute alert ended, I returned to my tea and sat at the oak table.

My computer mouse remained obediently on the central panel. The cracked veneer waited patiently for restoration. Beyond the balcony doors, Kyiv continued with its Monday morning.

When I was a child, I rearranged furniture because I sensed that changing a room could change how life felt inside it.

I still believe that.

Only now, I am no longer moving furniture merely to find a better place to read beneath a window. I am trying to create a place where people, memories and ideas can meet, and where something meaningful might gradually take shape around an old table.

Thank you for returning to Maisternia.

If you would like to help me continue writing from Kyiv, researching its architecture and building this independent workshop and the community growing around it, please consider a paid subscription or donation.

Your support helps keep the work moving, even when the furniture, the city and occasionally the architect require rearranging.

For now, the tea is warm, the table is steady in all the places that matter, and Maisternia Connections has found somewhere to sit.

It reminds me that someone beyond Ukraine wants me to breathe, sip a coffee and keep stitching letters into words, and words into stories that need to be told.

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Keep the Workshop Alive

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Friedrich Gustavovich Michelson, 1840 to 1908, was a Kyiv industrialist, first guild merchant and city council member. Among the capital’s wealthiest residents, he owned brick and glass factories alongside extensive properties containing homes, shops, offices, schools, hotels and public baths. His holdings became so substantial that they were described as a city within the city. His Neo-Renaissance complex of apartment buildings remains part of Kyiv’s architectural inheritance, although years of abandonment have left it dangerously vulnerable. Michelson’s Manor and Kyiv Post.

Complex of houses of Friedrich Michelson — Go 2 Kyiv

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