What we call beauty is perhaps the strength of our feeling of resistance to destructibility.
Kōbō Abe
Mariupol is a Ukrainian city on the edge of a battlefield. It has been hanging between life and death since the beginning of the armed conflict, where rocket attacks led to multiple casualties. Nowadays, the front line is just twenty kilometers to the east. War…Plans for life that have never come true, dreams that nobody believes in – like frozen and abandoned construction sites.
Uncertain future and fear paralyzed the city’s development and people began to look for a better life elsewhere. The younger generation doesn’t see their future here, but life goes on even surrounded by danger. More than five hundred thousand people still live in this industrial center on the warm shore of the Sea of Azov.
Fifteen years ago, we started to work for Mariupol, committed to making the city a better place for life. We have developed several projects including a shopping center, a residential complex, and a resort hotel, as well as other spaces that seek to increase the quality of life for the city’s inhabitants and support the business infrastructure in Mariupol. During years of relative political and economic stability in Ukraine, some of our projects were completed.
However, with several of our projects, the final construction stage was suspended by war. This made the completion of these projects impossible for an unknown period of time. These frozen projects became “postponed dreams” that no one was willing to give up. Returning to Mariupol was part of our enduring hope.
Finally, something unbelievable happened. Our client decided to ignore and even attempt to halt the current tailspin of the city. He returned to Mariupol willing to continue and complete one of the frozen projects. Turning this hopeful dream into a reality was a matter of honor for us.
The situation in the local construction industry is very different today – it simply does not exist as it used to. Qualified specialists have left, the market of construction materials has collapsed, and contractors from other cities refuse to come to Mariupol. This project is difficult during every aspect of the process. Could our dreams come true, is it possible at all? Should this project remain as it was designed before the tragic events? How to keep it in-demand today and in the days to come? We were asking ourselves these questions every day.
After long discussions, we decided to keep the highest possible architectural quality of the initial project that would be achievable with current capabilities. The team of specialists who took the risk to return to Mariupol and the local contractors share our optimism and desire for life-affirming changes. We believe that the united effort of all the people involved in the project will make a significant contribution to the renewal of the city. Today, teams working on other projects have also restarted construction, as they share the same hopes and belief in the city.
Creation and destruction, architecture and war –this absurd pairing exists for ages. How to break this vicious circle? Is it possible to create beauty that will make destruction impossible?