SEAMS FOR BROKEN PLACES
Without undermining the amount of political confusion, destruction, violent protests, and deaths that have taken place over the last year, it is undeniable that the current crisis in Ukraine actually began long ago. The country of Ukraine gradually blends into Russia geographically, architecturally, linguistically, politically, and the border between the two countries did not even exist until 1991. Thus, Ukraine has perpetually suffered from a confused identity, with half of the country hoping to have a future in the European Union and the other pulling back on historical ties to Russia’s Soviet Union. Through deep investigation and analysis of Ukraine’s complicated fragmentation, Seams For Fractured Places is a project which pursues architectural solutions for finding a whole through imagined seams. Relying on the allegory to represent each level of work, the project suggests that seams occur through the restoration or creation of relationships between different archetypes and that their disconnect causes the fragments to separate. Architecture is the work that imagines a solution but accepts that it cannot be the only determinate. Although this work moves toward a whole, it accepts that the solution, or amnesty, could never come without the people and their livelihood and that architecture can only begin to propose how these fragments might come together.