“Context is king,” an adage routinely referenced across creative domains, especially architecture, carries a hefty—perhaps even insolent—weight. Beyond its prosaic spatial, geographical and cultural relevance, the processes of locating a design insist scrutiny upon social, historical, political and temporally canonical dimensions too. For instance, the blanket term reformative architecture (and similar others) may simultaneously reference affordable infrastructure delimited to restore dignity as well as regenerative designs undertaken to repair ecological damage. Similarly, it may also denote innovative projects attempted in the aftermath of natural disasters or nationalistic development initiated in the wake of post-war fallouts. However, the approach and treatment of each of these projects, albeit positioned to offer relief, vary as a consequence of their situational context.

In this vein, it is also pertinent to study and understand the larger political context of regional clashes and wars before one attempts to address spatial rehabilitation—of people as well as scorched lands—that have endured wreckage from human-made weapons. After all, wars, devastating as they can be, are still not uniformly endured by all. Third-world countries—especially those in the Middle East and Africa—continue to remain in a state of continuous violent flux whilst also enduring censorship, ostracisation and desertion by their neighbours, global media houses and welfare organisations. Meanwhile, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, having begun in February 2022, garners almost a dichotomous solicitude for Ukrainians, globally. Several European nations including the UK have opened up accelerated immigration channels for Ukrainians fleeing the war, even as several Arab refugees continue to be on-the-fence hopefuls owing to duplicitous stances on strife elsewhere, and Western solidarity, as it stands currently, being limited to people who "look like them", to quote but a few of the various transmission channels and news headlines accompanying this phenomenon. On a global (perhaps even human) level, such commiserations shouldn't warrant comparisons in aid and solidarity lent to nations at war, but the stark disparity cannot, and should not, draw a feigning of attention.

Against this context, one understands that rehabilitative initiatives in places such as Yemen, Sudan, Palestine and other Global South nations require work at various levels. In Palestine, for instance, this includes—though is not limited to—resisting spatial occupation and aggression by the IDF, surviving in impermanent shelters, disseminating epistemic reasoning to gain favour (and help) for their cause, rebuilding from rubble and enduring the systemic transformation of their material sites into battlegrounds and graveyards. Meanwhile, Ukrainians seem to have been afforded the bare dignity in troubled times to narrate their stories and work towards rebuilding the country with support from its allies and neighbours, sans the burden of having to prove its victimhood. This alone is bound to make space for the Ukrainian people to expend resources on coming up with pragmatic measures for rebuilding the country. It is an unfortunate conundrum in a world where human aid is politicised and the united in UN is but a rhetorical question.

A series of such pragmatic references and examples, collated and edited by Ukrainian architect Bohdan Kryzhanovsky, are compiled in the book Architecture After War: A Reader, co-published by London-based publication MACK and Ukrainian platform CANactions.

Even as violence ensues in the region, Kryzhanovsky, in the book's introductory chapter, The Cypress And The Arch, alludes to a relief depicting a cypress tree sprouting from the inside of an arch—from the sarcophagus of St Olga in Kyiv—that serves as a metaphor of reconstruction and renaissance. “Even in the midst of this terrible moment, while there is so much immediate work to do on military, political and humanitarian fronts, turning to the idea of architecture after war is relevant and important. It brings a humanistic focus to the conversation and shapes the future of both political and architectural thinking,” Kryzhanovsky writes.

Work on Architecture After War: A Reader began in March 2022, at the beginning of the full-blown invasion of Ukraine. Split across 10 chapters (including Kryzhanovsky’s preface), the book covers a variety of historical examples in disparate geographic contexts to help readers "navigate the challenges and opportunities that define post-war reconstruction and war-related issues within the field of architecture". With historical examples from Japan, Lebanon, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland, contributors explore the impact of war on architectural education, urban planning, building materials and novel spatial relations, while also centring the narrative on the exploration of the human experience in the aftermath of war.

The narratives, hence, serve as a springboard for wider conversations pertaining to post-war reconstruction, as well as a handbook of ideas for architects, planners and policy makers; an overarching guide for shaping the future of Ukraine. This hopeful output presented in the form of a thoroughly researched book underlines the fact that “no matter how devastating and seemingly interminable, wars do eventually end,” as excerpted in Patrick Zamarian’s essay, Architectural Education in Times of Turmoil, The United Kingdom in the Second World War. With examples of the transformation of architectural education and practice in Britain during and after the Second World War, Zamarian stresses the need to act and prepare now instead of waiting for the war to end.

Similar examples of reconstructing the identity, infrastructures and the ethos at large of post-war nations come from John Pendlebury via his review of the Exeter and Warsaw plans, post the Second World War, in his essay Visions of Reconstruction. Pendlebury, pivoting his argument on architectural historian John Bold and town planner Thomas Sharp’s assertions, argues in favour of contemporary infrastructural renewals, in the aftermath of wars, that retain the same scale as their historical predecessor. Further, Pendlebury also advocates for preserving historical structures that have managed to remain intact in the aftermath of wars. Both these measures hint at an attempt to retain vestiges or memories of archaic structures and morphologies within cities, while also improving and adapting urban configurations with novel and innovative means.

Further, in the essay Parallel Post-Wars: West Germany After 1945, Lynnette Widder cites examples of various German post-war reconstruction projects wherein architects mined the ruins for necessary building materials. The essay also weighs in on the ways in which nature reclaimed voids in the city created by war.

With a chronological listing of distinct stages, Peter J. Larkham, in his essay Learning from Experiences of Post-Catastrophe Reconstruction, delineates how post-disaster replanning and reconstruction can be undertaken methodically, both in a generic context as well as in Ukraine, in particular. Further, Andrea Flores Urushima’s An Introduction to Reconstruction in Japan stipulates, through the example of Japan’s post-war recovery, the necessity to integrate a long-term vision for the future of Ukraine in tandem with evolving demographics, energy and materials, as well as the addressal of interdependencies between urban and rural territories.

This thought is further appended by Jan Knikker and Fokke Moerel in their essay A Journey from Rotterdam: Towards a Forward-Looking Reconstruction, where the author cites the example of Rotterdam taking the destruction caused during the Second World War as an opportunity to "create the modern city that it wanted to be". As contentious as this proposition may sound, Knikker and Moerel’s postulation for multidisciplinary and participatory involvement in reconstruction highlights its necessity to prompt a positive future that is temporally and functionally holistic.

Extending upon the necessity of locally rooted interdisciplinary participation in the domain of post-war reconstruction, Gruia Badescu, in his essay Before the War Ends: Making Sense of Ruins and Reconstruction, posits the question of reconstruction in ways that permit engagement with the trauma of war. “Reconstruction needs to be fast enough to provide urgently needed shelter and infrastructure, but it should permit a form of societal engagement with the trauma of loss. Emplacement—recovering urban environments for people to feel at home—is a key goal. And that is as much spatial as it is a social process,” Badescu writes.

Wendy Pullan’s The Disingenuous ‘Clean Slate’: Key Concerns for Reconstructing Ukraine extends on Badescu’s assertion of engaging society for empathetic post-war reconstruction and argues against the desirability of modernist dictums of ‘clean slate’, a tabula rasa, and ‘starting at zero’ in the aftermath of post-war destruction. “When war destruction is very extensive, as in a number of Ukrainian cities, the desire to write off the existing wreckage, bulldoze everything, create a new masterplan and completely rebuild as fast as possible can be very attractive. But this approach may privilege certain interests whose prime motivations are political influence and financial profit achieved through lucrative megaprojects that control future growth and power at the expense of the local population,” Pullan shares. Lastly, Silke Langenberg, in her essay Learning from the Twentieth Century: (Re)Building Large Quantities Within a Short Period, concludes with an acknowledgement of the built legacy of the post-war decades, highlighting amongst them lessons that Ukraine can adopt.