In a studio at Warsaw University of Technology, Irish and European architecture students are sketching a future for Kharkiv—Ukraine’s battered second city—one street, shelter and skyline at a time.
Architecture students from the University of Limerick and University College Dublin have joined peers from Poland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine for a two-week “Building Back Better” workshop focused on post-war designs for Kharkiv’s recovery. Organized with the Kharkiv School of Architecture, the program has drawn more than 100 students, academics and architects to working hubs in Warsaw and Lviv, a cross-border experiment in rebuilding amid an ongoing war.
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The Irish contingent—15 students from the University of Limerick’s School of Architecture and two from UCD—traveled to Poland with support from the European Union’s Erasmus program. They are working in mixed teams alongside students from the host campus in Warsaw and from Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic, fusing local knowledge with outside perspective.
“One of the biggest tasks this week has been to listen and be diligent to the concerns of the Ukrainians within our group, and also the students who are bilocated with us in Lviv,” said Peter Carroll, head of architecture at the University of Limerick. Those concerns, he added, range from national identity to Kharkiv’s exposed geography next to Russia.
The stakes are stark. Roughly 30 kilometers from the current frontline, Kharkiv has been shelled since Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022. Strikes continue to kill and injure residents and have scarred the city’s diverse architectural heritage. Just last week, six people were killed in the Kharkiv region when Russian drones struck a passenger train, underscoring how fragile daily life remains.
Against that backdrop, the workshop is designed to merge urgency with rigor. Students have been divided into four streams of inquiry, each focusing on a different scale: the building block, the district, the entire city and the wider region. The aim is to generate layered strategies that can be applied from an apartment courtyard to a transit corridor to a metropolitan plan.
For non-Ukrainian students, the learning curve is steep—and deliberate. “From our perspective I suppose, it’s about trying to understand the context of Kharkiv and Ukraine, which for a lot of us coming from Ireland is very much different,” said Alexander Gniazdowski, a fourth-year architecture student at Limerick. “Alongside our Ukrainian colleagues, we’re trying to propose a way of looking at the city or the region that might be constructive for the future.”
Collaboration runs deeper than shared desks. Among the UL and UCD cohort are three Ukrainian-born architecture students who moved to Ireland with their families shortly after the invasion, bringing personal experience of displacement to the group’s conversations about safety, identity and belonging.
“What I like about this project is that people from outside get to know Ukraine better, to understand what’s going on there, and probably help in the future,” said Oleksandra Deineha, a third-year architecture student at UCD who moved from the western Khmelnytskyi region to County Offaly in 2022. “I think it’s very important for Ukraine to have a new generation of architects that will be able to help rebuild its cities.”
That rebuilding will have to reckon with a fundamental design constraint: security. In Lviv, where another wing of the workshop is operating, architects say that protection and refuge are no longer peripheral considerations—they are the brief.
“We consider safety much more right now than we used to,” said Lviv-based architect Nataliia Liuklian, who is collaborating with the students. The construction and integration of shelters, she noted, has quickly become a priority in Ukrainian architectural practice, shaping everything from street-level infrastructure to schools, hospitals and housing.
For practitioners from Kharkiv, the work carries an added emotional weight. “The project can bring some new ideas and some hope,” said Kharkiv architect Andrii Hirniak, who is working with students at the Lviv workshop. The urgency, he suggested, is less about theoretical models than about tangible pathways forward for a city that continues to absorb attacks. The workshop, he said, is “more important for Kharkiv itself and the people who are [still] there.”
Inside the Warsaw studio, that impact is being pursued through a blend of research and rapid prototyping. Teams have spent the past two weeks mapping Kharkiv’s history, politics, ecology and archaeology—compressing a city’s complexities into an intensive seminar. On the building scale, students are studying how apartment blocks might be retrofitted with blast-resistant spaces and dual-use common areas that can convert to shelters. At the district level, they are exploring neighborhood networks that ensure redundancy in power, water and communications. City-wide, the focus is on reconnecting transit, reopening public spaces and restoring damaged cultural sites without erasing wartime memory. Regional plans take on supply chains, agricultural belts and the realities of a borderland that could remain volatile for years.
The “Building Back Better” initiative is now in its third edition involving staff and students from Limerick. Earlier iterations focused on Dnipro city and region in 2024 and on Odesa and the Black Sea coast in 2025, laying groundwork for a series of post-war recovery toolkits that adapt to place and politics. The ambition this year, faculty say, is to knit Kharkiv’s specific needs—security, services, identity—into a design language that local officials and communities can use.
The program ends tomorrow with teams in Warsaw and Lviv presenting research and design proposals. Those plans will be published, Carroll said, so they can inform ongoing debates about reconstruction and serve as a reference for public and private partners.
“The intention is to have something that is durable and that will affect the future,” Carroll said. “That’s really what we’re trying to do in a very short space of time.”
The students insist that speed and sensitivity can coexist. Part of their assignment has been listening—to Kharkiv residents, to colleagues who fled, to classmates still living under air-raid sirens. That process, they say, reshapes the architect’s role from author to ally, from maker of objects to builder of systems that help people endure and then thrive.
Much of the work seems prosaic: checklists of fortified stairwells, block-by-block utility grids, modular structures that can be erected fast and adapted later. But in a city where the next strike can collapse months of progress, practicality is a form of care—and design.
There are also gestures of cultural repair. Students are tracing Kharkiv’s mosaic of architectural styles—Constructivist icons, pre-war townhouses, Soviet-era housing estates—looking for restoration strategies that preserve character while updating infrastructure. Public spaces are being reimagined as places for gathering and remembrance, with designs that fold in wayfinding, lighting and landscape that can also direct people to safety.
For the Irish students, the workshop is also a lesson in how architecture moves beyond drawings. Erasmus funding covered their travel and stays, but the value, they say, lies in the networks formed with Ukrainian peers and mentors who will carry the work forward on the ground.
What happens after tomorrow’s presentations will not be measured in grades. It will be counted in decisions by officials and communities in Kharkiv who, amid loss, must decide how to live. If the students’ proposals help a neighborhood reopen a market, a school add a safe room, or a cultural landmark set a path to restoration, the drawings made in Warsaw and Lviv may begin to alter lives hundreds of miles away.
For now, the sketchbooks keep filling, the maps keep updating and the questions keep coming. How do you rebuild while a war still burns? Where can you put memory so it heals instead of hardens? And what does “better” mean when the past is full of beauty that cannot be replicated and the present demands defenses that cannot be ignored?
In Warsaw and Lviv, the work continues—an exercise in humility, persistence and hope, guided by students whose designs are anchored not just in form, but in the people of a city determined to endure.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
