Max Rozenfeld has spent much of the war imagining how the destruction of Kharkiv presents opportunities for reinventing its future.
He is trained as an artist and a historian of architecture. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on high-tech style, focussing on the British architect Norman Foster. A dozen years ago, he started leading walking tours of Kharkiv, which were spectacularly popular: his record was three hundred and forty-five people on a single tour. The tours made Max a household name in Kharkiv. He made multi-episode series on various aspects of the city’s history, first for YouTube, then for television. But none of this was of use now.
In April, Norman Foster addressed a meeting of mayors from around the world who convened in Geneva. He stressed the role of architects in rejuvenating cities after a war, particularly in designing master plans, such as the one devised for the city of London while the Second World War was still raging. Later that month, Kharkiv’s mayor, Ihor Terekhov, announced that Foster and his nonprofit, the Norman Foster Foundation, had agreed to work on such a plan in collaboration with the city. Max, who had never imagined he’d hear the words “Kharkiv” and “Foster” in the same sentence, was asked to join Foster’s working group. He was one of only two architects selected who were still physically in Kharkiv—the only people in a position to “show” Kharkiv to Foster.
At weekly Zoom meetings, the group, which included members from the U.N.’s Economic Commission for Europe and the global engineering and design firm Arup, discussed Kharkiv’s landscape, history, and character, the extent of the damage that Russian attacks had done to the city, the city’s economy, ecology, and transportation infrastructure, and how all of those things should be restored or improved in a postwar future. Max had built a business on knowing Kharkiv better than anyone else did, but now he felt like he was getting to know the city all over again.
Max and his colleagues proposed a concept to Foster, an invented identity for Kharkiv: the frontier city. Back in the seventeenth century, this was an outpost of the Russian tsardom and also a place where people fled from the Cossack-Polish war. In the nineteenth century, one of the first universities in the empire opened here. In the twentieth century, it was a creative hub for art, literature, early modernist architecture, and science. “It is a place for dreamers and inventors,” Max told me, referencing Frederick Jackson Turner’s idea about the frontier as a “field of opportunity.” At the February press conference to discuss the master plan, Foster used the word “fortress.” The vision that he outlined was grand. It included restoring the largely bombed-out building of the regional administration as a functional monument, the way Foster did with the former Reichstag building in Berlin by capping it with a giant glass dome. More ambitiously, it included a “science neighborhood” in the vicinity of the partially destroyed but still operational Barabashovo market. Max hopes that, in the city of the future, this space would be filled with housing and academic campuses and labs affiliated with universities like Harvard and M.I.T. Still, it was striking that both of them seemed to draw on settler-colonialist theory and military imagery to imagine what Kharkiv might be like after a colonial war.