Ukrainian Modernism: Modernist Architecture of Ukraine, published by FUEL, is a visual study of Soviet-era buildings across the country, documented by Ukrainian architectural photographer and tour guide Dmytro Soloviov. Raised in Zaporizhzhia and now based in Kyiv, Soloviov began the project as a personal pursuit – photographing the buildings he encountered in daily life, drawn to their forms, textures and layered histories. Over time, this archive grew into a public effort to shape how these structures are remembered, challenging the notion that their value lies solely in their association with a discredited regime.

Soloviov draws a crucial distinction between architecture commissioned by a state and architecture shaped by those who designed, built, used and gave meaning to it. While many of the buildings were constructed during the Soviet period, they are also the work of Ukrainian architects and labour, embedded in civic life. Their continued presence, he suggests, is not about nostalgia or glorification, but about preserving a material record of a complex past – one that cannot be understood if erased from view. This is particularly evident when considering the 2022 invasion and international media coverage in the face of it. The most widely circulated images were of Orthodox cathedrals, Baroque streets, and wooden churches – symbols designed to evoke heritage and permanence. This selective framing sought to amplify the sense of loss by drawing focus on monuments, but it also obscured the architectural landscapes that were more commonplace, more 'everyday' and yet distinctly Ukrainian by that very virtue. Soloviov’s work challenges that imbalance, documenting the cinemas, cultural halls, and housing blocks that rarely make headlines yet hold the social histories without which Ukraine’s modern identity cannot be understood. By shifting focus from gilded cathedrals to everyday modernist buildings—civic centres, housing estates, cultural halls—the book foregrounds the architecture that truly defines Ukraine’s present as well as Soviet-era urban reality.

[The images] presented a seductive but rather partial picture, a kitsch land of gold and domes and the Virgin Mary that had fairly little correspondence with anywhere most Ukrainians actually lived.”

– Dmytro Soloviov

Interestingly, ‘Ukrainian Modernism’ is not a formal term in architectural theory. Linguistically speaking, in Ukrainian—as in Russian or Spanish—‘modernism’ usually referred to the decorative styles of the early 1900s, known elsewhere as Art Nouveau. Here, it denotes the international Modern movement that emerged across Europe after World War I, with Ukrainian cities like Kharkiv, Dnipro, Kyiv and Odesa playing a part often overlooked in mainstream histories. As Soloviov puts it, “It’s modern architecture, and it’s in Ukraine, that’s basically it.”

Soloviov’s photographs are introduced by British critic Owen Hatherley, known for his work on the politics of post-war architecture, who began visiting Ukraine in 2010 while researching its avant-garde heritage. Together, they trace two distinct waves of modernism in the country. The first, in the 1920s, grew out of Constructivism, producing workers’ clubs, palaces of culture and communal housing – as radical in geometry as they were in social ambition. Buildings like the Derzhprom complex in Kharkiv and the Illich Palace of Workers in Dnipro embodied this vision, combining bold structural experimentation with a belief in collective progress.

This first wave of modernism was quickly suppressed under Joseph Stalin—buried beneath cladding, silenced in official histories—with its authors erased from public life. The second wave, beginning after Stalin’s death in 1953, reconnected Ukrainian architects to international movements—Brutalism, Japanese Metabolism, Mexican Modernism—reinterpreted through local conditions. In western Ukraine, for instance, folk motifs and steep-roofed geometries were woven into concrete forms. In other regions, during the later stages of the second wave, Ukrainian modernism developed its own distinct vocabulary.

In Dnipro, the centre of Soviet rocket production, bold concrete structures from the Brezhnev era were almost always clad in tile or mosaic – partly to mask uncertainty about concrete quality, but also to create vast canvases for monumental art. These works fused Orthodox mosaic traditions with Constructivist abstraction, Mexican muralism and post-Stalin realist styles. For Soloviov, even in this later Postmodern phase, the modernist core endured.

The architecture isn’t banal Postmodernism, not just towers of glass or neoclassical kitsch, but good Postmodernism, where modernism was still playing the main part. – Dmytro Soloviov

The mosaics and tiled facades in Dnipro speak to more than aesthetics – they are artefacts of a political stop-start, where architectural ambition constantly collided with Moscow’s shifting directives. A cinema conceived during Khrushchev’s reforms might later be completed under Brezhnev, its form altered, its surfaces reshaped to align with stricter ideological demands. These layered compromises, visible across Ukraine’s modernist landscape, reveal just how fragile the space for experimentation really was, as policies of de-Stalinisation were repeatedly undercut by waves of Russification. A change in Moscow’s mood could slow a project for years, censor its public art, or halt it entirely. That fragility is part of what makes Soloviov’s images urgent: they are not just records of a style, but of a cultural rhythm—creation, suppression, adaptation—that has repeated across decades.

This writeup itself took shape slowly, over nearly two months, caught between the urgency of production and a lingering sense of futility in the face of the precarity of human life. In the midst of concurrent crises, writing about preserving buildings and architectural heritage seemed almost frivolous. Yet, over time, it felt easier to accept that architecture is inseparable from the story of survival itself – a record of the cycles that shape societies. Moments of progress yield to repression; recovery is interrupted by destruction. Ukraine’s modernist legacy sits within this wider paradigm, mirrored in Berlin, Kabul, Kashmir, Warsaw, Gaza and elsewhere – places where cities have been rebuilt again and again upon the remnants of their former selves. In such cycles, architecture is never neutral: it holds memory. It becomes a target for erasure and forms the scaffolding for cultural recovery.

The Kyiv Crematorium, designed in the late 1960s and pictured in the book, embodies precisely this layered history. Its expressive sculptural wall, confronting war, fascism and Stalinism was concealed under concrete by Soviet authorities. Today, activists chip away at that covering, revealing not just the artwork, but the truths it holds.

It is not just conservation, but a widening out from there to do what the Soviets couldn’t: start an honest conversation about the forces that have time and again subjected this country to needless suffering – dictatorship, militarism, nationalism, the bullying chauvinism of the world’s ‘great powers’. That should not be covered over again. – Owen Hatherley

In many ways, Ukrainian Modernism is an attempt to open that conversation using images and histories to resist another cycle of forgetting.

'Ukrainian Modernism' is published by FUEL and can be purchased here.