Earlier this year the unprovoked barbaric Russian invasion of neighboring independent Ukraine forced millions of people to flee their cities and the country in search of safety. I talked to one of Ukraine’s top architects, Oleg Drozdov, who was forced to relocate his practice and architecture school he co-founded in Kharkiv, to Lviv, 1,000 kilometers to the west, next to the Polish border. His staff and professors — many of them assume both roles — resumed their work just weeks after the war broke out.
Oleg Drozdov (b. 1966, Volgodonsk, Russia) graduated from Architecture School at the Civil Engineering Institute in Kharkiv in 1990. After working for two years as an architect in Sumy, a city 180 kilometers northwest of Kharkiv, Drozdov left the country to pursue his artistic career as a painter in Europe, settling for several years in Prague. He returned to Kharkiv in the mid-90s to restart his architectural career, establishing his studio Drozdov&Partners in 1997. Parallel to working on commercial projects such as fashion boutiques, restaurants, galleries, commercial centers, apartment buildings, and houses in Ukraine and across Europe, the architect was involved in teaching and research projects that included developing new prefabricated materials and building types, as well as utilizing materials from demolished buildings. In 2017 Drozdov co-founded the Kharkiv School of Architecture (KHSA).
