This lecture will be in person and is part of the Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited."

Anna Pashynska (left) is the co-founder and curator of the METALAB city laboratory, the CO-HATY affordable housing project, and the POLE Research and Product Design Center. She has over ten years of work experience in Ukraine and Austria as a curator, project manager, urban planner, and designer. Anna manages various projects, specializing in spatial research and design, product design, public space projects, initiated communities, and institutional planning.

Tania Pashynska (right) is co-founder and architect of the CO-HATY affordable housing project in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. She is an architect, stage designer, and 3D artist. Most of her architectural practice has been focused on repurposing and planning residential buildings. Her designs are created through hands-on experiments and collaborations with local manufacturers and the community. With a background in dance, she is keen on designing spaces for performances and movement.

"From Rapid Sheltering to Social Housing": The discussion will explore the transformative experience of providing housing in Ukraine, highlighting the power of collaboration, horizontal organizing, and knowledge exchange. It will demonstrate how architecture plays a critical role in building collective resistance, offering hope to imperiled communities. It will also emphasize the shifting role of architects in times of crisis and the importance of core values in the field. The presentation will trace the evolution from a volunteering movement to pioneering new housing models that influence national policies and laws. The focus will be on the mission-driven housing provided by the third sector, which prioritizes dignity, community development, circularity, and innovative solutions. These efforts are crucial for filling gaps left by the market and government, leveraging diverse funding sources, and ensuring sustainability.

Suggested Reading: Booklet for METALAB members Anna Pashynska, Anna Dobrova, Tania Pashynska, Yuliia Holiuk, and Yulia Rusylo's The Beauty of Care project, which was showcased at the Ukrainian pavilion during the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023.

"Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited" examines innovative solutions to the global housing crisis. It situates our contemporary dilemma in the powerful arguments made by Friedrich Engels in the 1870s and 1880s. In his revolutionary text, The Housing Question, Engels argued that the dearth of adequate shelter was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As a result of working-class exploitation endemic to capitalist modernity, the housing crisis was resolvable only by a revolutionary reconstruction of workers’ power that would result in the collective ownership of land and the means of production. “Design Matters” inverts Engels’s argument, putting design, architecture, and planning first. It expands his geographic, cultural, and temporal frame to include cities outside of Western Europe, and it probes places damaged by the devastating consequences of war, the climate emergency, and other catastrophes. A bevy of on-the-ground examples, conceived at multiple scales and aimed at reconstruction, are changing policy, politics, practice, and design. In the face of extraordinary challenges, architects, planners, and providers are collaborating to produce humane affordable solutions to the housing crisis, and suggesting that architecture is needed to provoke political change.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact  ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu " rel="noopener" target="_blank"> ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu .

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.