Comfort Town: a 115-acre housing development that has taken shape in a drab, Soviet-era district of Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.
The Comfort Town housing development in Kiev, Ukraine, is the first residential complex in Ukraine based on the block development principle. “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy’s house is swept away from the black-and-white world of Kansas and lands with a thud in Oz, a wonderland of blinding Technicolor.
It’s a remarkable speech. Khrushchev at times sounds less like the leader of the international communist movement than he does a construction contractor trying to land a large industrial account. No detail is too small to capture his attention. Later, under Khrushchev’s successors, the five-story buildings gave way to much taller apartment blocks. Every few years, the design would change, but entire districts of cities such as Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev were populated with rows of colorless high-rise buildings that seemed to stretch to the horizon.
The idea was born about a decade ago, according to co-designer Dmitro Vasyliev, who was among a team of architects charged with building a new housing development on the site of an abandoned rubber factory in one of the Ukrainian capital’s most blighted districts. They wanted it to stand apart from the Soviet-era housing surrounding it. They wanted to build a place that people would find inviting, that might actually lift residents’ spirits rather than crush them.
Still, the similarities to Soviet housing are striking — such as the inclusion of schools and a fitness center within the development. Comfort Town may be a reaction to Soviet architecture, Snopek said, but “what I think is funny in this situation is how little a reaction it is.”
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