What an Architect Sees When Kyiv Burns
Between explosions, cigarettes and cups of tea, a Kyiv architect discovers that war redesigns every room, road and ordinary sound in the city he loves.
Vitayu. I am Hryhorii Afanasiev, an architect living in central Kyiv. This means I spend my days arguing politely with millimetres and my nights discovering that Russian missiles have very little respect for planning permission.
I had imagined that my first note from Maisternia would begin with a drawing. Perhaps I would show you a floor plan, explain the logic of a material, or defend a line that looked unnecessary until you understood why it was there. Architects enjoy doing this. We take something simple, surround it with tracing paper, and explain why it took three months.
But I am not talking about architecture this time. Probably not for some time, at least not in the way people usually expect architects to speak about it.
And yet this is the very heart of the subject.
Before I can tell you about Ukrainian architecture, I need to tell you about Ukrainian life. I need to show you the rooms in which we wait, the corridors in which we try to sleep, the balconies from which we watch the sky, and the kitchens where we boil water after an explosion. I need to tell you how war enters a building without being invited, how it changes the meaning of a window, and how a sofa cushion can become part of a survival plan.
I need to tell you how Ukrainian architecture is being shaped by war, because Ukrainian people are being shaped by war inside it.
On the night of 2 July 2026, at 1.25 in the morning, I went out onto my balcony for a cigarette.
In the building opposite, fairy lights were glowing on an open balcony.
They were small, warm and completely ordinary. Under different circumstances, I might have thought about their colour temperature, their position, or whether they made the balcony feel more intimate. That is the professional illness of an architect. We cannot simply look at a light. We must interrogate it.
But that night the lights seemed to be doing something more important than illuminating a balcony. They were declaring that someone lived there. Somewhere behind those points of light was a kitchen, a bed, perhaps a half-finished cup of tea. Someone had chosen to make that small part of the city beautiful, even though the sky above it was flashing with explosions.
Russian weapons flickered around Kyiv while the fairy lights remained on.
For a moment, the city seemed to contain two competing ideas of light. One had been arranged by a person to make a home feel warmer. The other had been sent by a state to frighten, destroy and kill. Both occupied the same darkness, but only one belonged there.
I smoked and watched.
Cars were moving along the roads below. It had been a long time since I had heard so many cars at night. Their movement surprised me. During an air raid, every ordinary sound becomes strangely significant. An engine is no longer merely an engine. It means that somebody is going somewhere. Perhaps towards a shelter, perhaps towards a hospital, perhaps home, or perhaps simply away from the unbearable feeling of standing still.
We usually think of roads as lines on a plan. Architects and urban planners speak about circulation, capacity and connections. Drivers speak about traffic. Pedestrians speak about crossings. Kyiv, naturally, contributes potholes to the discussion.
But during bombardment, a road becomes a pulse. Every car passing beneath my balcony says that the city has not stopped.
The explosions continued. I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, took a cup of tea and carried on writing.
There is an absurdity in wearing noise-cancelling headphones during an air raid. They are designed to remove the world so that you can concentrate, while the world outside is demanding that you listen carefully enough to survive.
We should not have to live in a place where we lower the volume of our music to make sure we hear the warning sounds in time.
That thought would not leave me.
The air raid alert had already become one of the longest we had endured in recent weeks. Not far from my home, the roof of a three-storey non-residential building was burning. I could not sleep, but it was not the fear of death keeping me awake. It was the thought of the kind of world in which I wanted to live.
Fear is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is simply practical. You charge your telephone. You check the news. You listen for the difference between one sound and another. You decide whether the hallway is safer than the bedroom. You put the kettle on because tea remains one of the few emergency procedures on which Ukrainians and the British can agree.
But beneath those small decisions was a larger question.
What kind of country would we build if we were allowed to begin again today?
We have inherited our land, our history and our people, but we have not inherited a finished state. We must build it ourselves.
Any building can be rebuilt.
Any city can be redesigned.
The hardest task is to create the conditions in which a person will want to become a better person.
At 2.10/am, the explosions grew louder. I left the room and moved into the hallway of my flat.
The hallway has no heroic qualities. Nobody entering my home would stop there and admire its proportions. It is a passage between rooms, a space designed for leaving one place and reaching another.
During an attack, however, it becomes the place where I may be safest.
I took the cushions from two sofas and arranged them on the floor as a mattress. It was surprisingly convenient. Perhaps all furniture should be judged by how quickly it can acquire a second life during a missile attack.
For my head, I found an ordinary sleeping pillow, separate from the sofa cushions. Printed on it was Vladimir Prylutskyi’s artwork “Peremova”.
“Peremova” is a deliberately invented word that does not appear in the Ukrainian dictionary. Prylutskyi created it from “peremovyny”, meaning negotiations, reshaping the word so that it also echoes “peremoha”, meaning victory. In this single word, negotiations and victory become inseparable. Victory is impossible without negotiations.
I looked at the pillow and almost laughed.
There I was, lying on an improvised mattress during a Russian attack, my head resting on a word that joined negotiations with victory, while gunfire and explosions continued outside.
A Moment in Kyiv’s Skies
War has a brutal sense of humour. It places words beside reality and waits for us to notice the distance between them.
I had been scrolling through Stories when I saw that a good friend was lying in the back of his car with a complete set of bedding. He had posted it two hours earlier. The firing was still echoing across the city, and Lachen was reporting another attack on Kyiv.
My friend had turned a car into a bedroom. I had turned a hallway into one. Across the city, thousands of people were quietly redesigning the spaces around them because the spaces had not been designed for the danger in which they now lived.
This is architecture too.
It is not the architecture of photographs, awards or polished presentations. It is architecture stripped back to its first obligation, the protection of human life.
Lying on the floor, shuddering when the explosions came closer, I began playing a game with myself.
“What would I be doing now if I lived in a better world?”
I did not mean paradise. Utopias are often suspicious places, especially when architects draw them. I imagined a parallel reality in which the dangers were understood and a plan had been prepared. A world in which safety was not improvised from sofa cushions at two in the morning.
What would I do in that other branch of reality, where I still had to protect my family at night?
Perhaps I would remain in my flat, but the flat would contain a dual-use shelter of the kind used in Israel. It would be part of everyday life when there was no danger and a protected room when danger arrived. In new buildings, we can design many forms of protective structure. We can calculate loads, reinforce walls, provide ventilation, secure communications and create spaces that preserve dignity as well as life.
But what do we do with historic buildings?
How do we protect the architecture that carries the memory of Kyiv without turning every home into a bunker?
What happens when an alert begins during the day and every member of a family is in a different part of the city?
A protective room can safeguard a body when that body reaches it. Architecture alone cannot bring scattered people home.
At 2.46/am, I read that five healthcare workers had been injured in the Shevchenkivskyi district. One of them was a paramedic in a critical condition. A medical facility had been partially destroyed.
Somewhere in the same city, people trained to save lives had become casualties while trying to do their work.
I went to make another cup of tea.
I began planning the morning. Should I try to recover some sleep, or should I go to Café Maria and reward myself with breakfast for surviving the night?
This may sound trivial. It is not.
War tries to reduce human beings to frightened bodies. It wants us to think only of the next impact, the next warning and the next list of casualties. Choosing breakfast is a modest act of resistance. It insists that the morning still belongs to the living.
At 4.40/am, without waiting for the air raid siren to end, I returned to the balcony for another cigarette.
On the way, I stopped before the mirror and photographed myself with my torso bare. I decided that I would post it. If the night was determined to be apocalyptic, I could at least maintain some control over the composition.
I stepped outside and removed my headphones.
Birds were singing.
Cars were moving through Kyiv again.
The city was alive.
Then I read the news.
“In the Darnytskyi district, following a direct hit, floors one to six of a nine-storey residential block have been destroyed.”
Darkness.
There is no architectural language capable of making that sentence less violent.
Floors one to six are not merely sections of a building. They are kitchens and beds. They are children’s drawings attached to refrigerators. They are bathrooms where people prepare for work, cupboards containing clothes, books left open, plants waiting to be watered, and photographs that mean nothing to anyone except the people who placed them there.
A residential block is described through numbers because numbers can be communicated quickly. Nine storeys. Six floors destroyed. A direct hit.
But a home is not a number.
Tomorrow would be a day of remembrance for the victims of the night’s terror. There would be names, photographs and fragments of lives. The city would mourn, clear glass from pavements, cover broken windows and continue moving because it has learned the terrible discipline of continuing.
I returned to the kitchen and living room. The fridge, which used to be very cool, was running loudly.
I listened to it with irritation and affection. Its noise had once been an ordinary domestic defect. After a night of explosions, it sounded almost reassuring. The electricity was working. The kitchen was still there. The fridge was performing its small duty to civilisation, although not discreetly.
At 6.00/am, I went out for another cigarette with YUKO playing.
At 6.05/am, I put the kettle on again.
At 6.09/am, I noticed the date and time recorded on one of my photographs. It appeared to belong somewhere between the balcony and the kettle, although my watch was running a few minutes fast.
Those minutes are always in short supply.
War changes one’s relationship with time. A few minutes can be the distance between a warning and an impact, between leaving one room and choosing another, between a building standing and the same building becoming news.
An architect usually thinks in years. A project may begin as an uncertain sketch and take years to become a place where someone can live. During an attack, we think in seconds. Yet the decisions made in those seconds often reveal the consequences of decisions made years before.
Was there a shelter nearby?
Could it be reached?
Was it open?
Could an elderly person descend the stairs?
Would a parent know where to find a child?
Could the building protect the people who trusted it with their sleep?
These questions will shape Ukrainian architecture long after the sirens fall silent.
At 9.00/am, I was sitting on the summer terrace at Café Maria.
The sun was beating down on the back of my neck, and I allowed myself to enjoy it. I washed down my antidepressants with a double flat white with sugar while we waited for Maria’s Spring Breakfast.
A few hours earlier, I had been lying on sofa cushions in a hallway beneath ‘The Truce’. Now there was coffee, sunlight, conversation and the promise of food.
Whilst smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, I spoke to my beloved, whom I had already named ‘my beloved’ in the book, about what the word ‘love’ means to me.
Perhaps love is not a declaration. Perhaps it is an arrangement of care.
It is knowing where another person is when the siren begins. It is asking whether they reached safety. It is leaving a light on. It is making room for another body in the hallway. It is remembering how someone takes their coffee after a night in which neither of you slept.
Architecture, at its most honest, is also an arrangement of care.
It decides whether a person feels welcome or exposed, connected or isolated, protected or abandoned. It determines whether a family can gather safely, whether a stranger can find the entrance, whether a child can reach the courtyard, and whether an old person can move through the city with dignity.
This is why I cannot separate architecture from the war around me.
Russia is not only attacking Ukrainian territory. It is attacking rooms, relationships, habits and memories. It is attempting to turn homes into coordinates and cities into targets.
Our answer cannot be limited to reconstructing what was destroyed exactly as it stood.
We must build a country in which life is worth returning to. We must create homes that protect without imprisoning, public spaces that bring people together, streets that remain human, and institutions that value a life before it becomes a casualty figure.
We must preserve memory without becoming trapped inside loss.
We must ask not only how many buildings can be rebuilt, but what kind of people those buildings will help us become.
That night, Kyiv gave me no finished answer. It gave me fairy lights on a balcony, cars moving beneath explosions, a noisy fridge, birds at dawn, cushions on a hallway floor, tea made again and again, and sunlight on my neck after a night of terror.
These are small things.
A city is made from small things.
So is a life.
And perhaps this is where Maisternia must begin, not with the certainty of a finished plan, but with a person standing on a balcony in Kyiv, looking into the darkness and asking what deserves to be built when morning comes.
