Look Up, But Mind the Floor

Inside Kyiv's forgotten school, beauty survived above collapsing floors, while the lives of Horowitz, Archipenko and Walker waited beneath dust to be remembered once again.

Architectural research usually begins with drawings, archives and polite emails. Mine began after another Russian night attack, with a cup of coffee, a telephone call to my mother and a stranger feeding cats beside an abandoned building.

I had come to photograph the facades at 12 Mykhaila Kotsiubynskoho Street. The man and I began talking, and something …