Maillart in Kharkiv : reliving Khemz's industrial legacy. Adaptive reuse project of the electromechanical factory by Robert Maillart in Kharkiv

If one looks on the post soviet city map he can notice the importance of the industrial areas in the soviet urban planning. They define the form of the cities, the vector of their development and are their monumental part. This areas were usually very well linked to the city, had own infrastructure, social services, residences and cultural buildings. In the capitalist European world big industrial plants are usually placed outside the cities, with time they got absorbed because of the city grow. On the contrary, in the soviet world the factories are morphological and social centres of the city. During the 5-years economical plans USSR gave special attention to the hard industries and military production. Thus Soviet Union soon became a superpower state. The importance of the factory for the state is readable through the architecture, social life, urban planning, music, theatres, and literature which we inherited. On the Kharkiv map are clearly visible ring-shaped compact old city with radial streets which tented to the capital Kiev and large scale orthogonal industrial quarters that gave new direction of the city development towards the industrial region of Donbas. Kharkiv is mainly industrial city and its relation of the city growth and time is incredibly high. The factories changed the city and created a new lifestyle. It was cool to work at the factory. The vertical organization of power leaded to the way of thinking that the state organized every single thing from economical to social life. The collapse of the system broke this scheme. Suddenly people had to think on their own. Now in the urban planning there is no clear vision for the sustainable development of the cities from the official organizations. In the city fabric there are many «dead zones». The contemporary city development plans are fragmented and based on the soviet ones. This plans provided large monofunctional zones (for example: one huge factory for working, one sleeping districts for the workers of the factory and one park as a walking area). It was a direct mirror of the political centralization and collectivisation into the social life. Each zone gathered a big amount of people and was equipped for it. They were such important attractor points that the connections between them were just transition ways. There was no need to take much care about them. Once the collectiveness disappeared from our life, these attractors lost their influence and it became hard to find a reason to gather so many people together. The need of multiple choices and smaller functional zones popped up. Whether you want to or not when you have a choice where to go you start to pay also more attention to the quality of the transition zones. Trivially people are not able to make comfortable outside the door of the proper house. Moreover there is a strong hate to everything what is collective. It is funny for me to observe how the relation to the surrounding space is changing on the example of my house. It is a concrete panel 9-storey building from the end of the 80-s. It had a very depressive appearance when the panel where not new anymore. Inside the house the staircases looked also depressive. On each floor there were 4 flats. Every two flats had a common tambour. Only the interior of the flats was different and everybody was trying to make it nice. With time the neighbours started to make this tambour cosy for them. But after this door nothing was changed for at least 20 years. Some years ago women from my floor decided to make nicer the common floor coriddor and decorated it with arrtificial flowers. It looks awful but it is not the same for them anymore. People started to take care about flowerbeds around the house. If the life went away from the place, it became unpopular and desert it means that its main component is not working anymore. Maybe the transportation is not comfortable, there are no social institutions which will bring flow of people, no work places, cultural places or all aforesaid together. Underline whatever applicable. The soviet urbanism created two main large scale ghettos: industrial and residential. Noticeable reduction of the production made the industrial districts desert. Around them are usually residential quarters, which lost their industrial centres and became sleeping districts without public places, nice playgrounds, parks and cinemas. On top of that are one-type concrete prefabricated buildings from Lviv to Vladivostok. This doesn’t mean bad or good, but it defines the input data, problems and special character of the post-soviet cities, their identity. The main task of this work is to defend the need of the reuse of the industrial buildings into something necessary for the city that is not an art cluster. The reuse of such place will bring culture anyhow. The space should not be treated in an extraordinary way but with attention to its history and atmosphere. If one listen he can hear what the space is whispering to him. The following pages and the project are the story I heard from the Maillart’s factory itself.