Ukraine turns thirty-five today. It is Independence Day1, which, given the neighbours, has become less a birthday than an annual act of professional stubbornness. There will be flags, jokes, memories, sirens and, because Ukrainians remain irritatingly committed to living, probably coffee before all of them. So, on this 24th of August, let us begin somewhere appropriately Ukrainian: with childhood, an old school, and the dangerous idea that tomorrow might still be better designed than today.
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.
“My dear citizens.
Your old friend is writing to you. I am the house at 12 Tymofiievska Street. Forgive me, 12 Kotsiubynskoho Street. I still have not become accustomed to every name people have given the street outside my doors.
The last architect who visited arrived carrying a cigarette for my caretaker and left with an oak table from my basement. They tell me the table now stands in a kitchen, where people have already eaten, argued about architecture, listened to music and collected money for others around it. I am pleased by this. A piece of furniture from my darkness has returned to use before I have.
I have always enjoyed watching one generation replace another. Children passed through my doors carrying books, worries, crumbs and ambitions. I remember the silence before an examination and the noise immediately after it. I remember shoes running along my stairs when running was certainly forbidden. Every school contains rules that exist mainly to prove that children are faster than rules.
I was made to house education. A gymnasium and a college lived inside me, along with teachers on the upper floor. To be a school was not merely my function. It was my way of taking part in the city.
I miss it.
I miss the pupils who looked at the clock and the pupils who forgot the clock entirely. I miss questions asked seriously and answers invented under pressure. I miss the moment when a child understood something that had seemed impossible five minutes earlier.
I dream that one day I might become myself again. I would welcome learners, help them prepare their projects and give shelter to ideas that do not yet know what form they will take.
There is so much creativity built into me. Look at the stucco on my ceilings. Look at the marble stairs where children once ran during their breaks. These things are not decoration added after architecture. They tell a person that learning deserves beauty, and that the person entering deserves dignity.
I value this dignity of mine, the ability of proportion, light and craft to make you stand a little differently. Perhaps this is my vanity. Perhaps it is my drug.
You may not have considered it, but buildings and people are alike. We also have a period of pregnancy, when an architect carries an image before the structure enters the world. We grow. We change. We inherit marks from everyone who lives inside us.
One hundred and twenty-seven years ago, I too was new. I had a first day. I saw a child sit at a desk and wondered whether I would manage the responsibility placed inside my walls.
Now my plaster falls. Rain enters where it should not. Doors have disappeared. Some rooms have been burned, and some floors have ceased to believe in gravity. Yet my decorative ceilings still hold their patterns above the debris. My windows still frame the city. My stairs still know where they were going.
Perhaps the dream of returning to life is the only thing holding my mental structure together.
I miss you. Come and visit me one day.
But not yet without permission, and please watch your step. My floor is not in its best condition.”
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.
Ukraine's Independence Day: Celebrated on 24 August, marking Ukraine's declaration of independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. In 2026, Ukraine marks thirty-five years of independence.
Obiednanyi (Об'єднаний): A local market in Donetsk where clothing and everyday goods were sold, familiar to generations who grew up in the city's working-class districts during the late Soviet and post-Soviet years.
Proletarskyi district, Donetsk: A district in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk, where the author grew up. Donetsk has been under Russian occupation since 2014 and was illegally claimed by Russia as annexed territory in 2022. Ukraine and most of the international community recognise it as sovereign Ukrainian territory.
Google Map Location [Go to Proletarskyi district of Donetsk]
Dnipro: The Dnipro River is one of Europe’s major rivers and runs through the centre of Kyiv, dividing the Ukrainian capital between its western and eastern banks.
Podil: One of Kyiv’s oldest historic neighbourhoods, situated along the Dnipro. For centuries it was an important commercial and cultural district and remains known for its historic streets, churches and architecture.
Italo disco: A form of electronic dance and pop music that emerged largely from Italy in the late 1970s and 1980s and became particularly popular across continental Europe and the Soviet bloc.
Friedrich Michelson: A prominent Kyiv entrepreneur and property developer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, associated with a substantial portfolio of buildings that helped shape the city's architecture during a period of rapid urban expansion.
12 Kotsiubynskoho Street / 12 Tymofiievska Street: The historic Kyiv building at the centre of this essay. Street names in Kyiv have changed repeatedly as governments, empires and political systems changed, leaving some buildings with several historical addresses and identities.
1 September: Traditionally the beginning of the school year in Ukraine and many other post-Soviet countries. Often known as the "Day of Knowledge", it has historically been marked by ceremonies, flowers for teachers and the symbolic ringing of the first school bell.