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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