Winner of contest for design of family-type small group homes in Ukraine picked in Estonia

TALLINN - Winners were announced in Tallinn on Monday in an architectural design competition for the standard design for family-type small group homes for parentless children in Ukraine.

It total 17 designs were submitted to the architectural competition, making it the largest Estonian-Ukrainian cooperation project in the field of architecture.

The winner is the design "Hata" by DAGOpen architects. Second place went to the design "Ruut" by Molumba architects and third place to the design "Krestiki Noliki" by Kuu architects. The project "Segasumm" by KOKO architects and Drozdov ta partnery received an incentive prize provided by Estonian company Thermory AS.

"I am delighted that the winning architects have conceived a building with a Ukrainian-inspired architecture that draws on European best practice. It is of great and symbolic importance that the Estonian-built space takes into account the Ukrainian cultural context and adds value to the environment. The building's architects demonstrate that informed spatial decisions can be made even in crisis projects, and this does not have to mean large additional costs," Estonia's Minister of Culture Heidy Purga said.

Andrea Kivi, acting CEO of the Estonian Center for International Development (ESTDEV), said there are 25,000 parentless children in Ukraine, many of them orphaned during the war. Providing orphans with a safe place to live and a home is a huge challenge for Ukraine as the country is defending itself in a war, and Estonia is ready to help.

"The competition gave us a great opportunity to work with Estonian and Ukrainian architects to create a new type of family house that is suitable for construction all over Ukraine and meets European Union standards. In this way, we are supporting Ukraine's reconstruction and its aspirations to join the European Union," Kivi said.

"Open architectural competitions are very important for the reconstruction of Ukraine, as it is the best way to create the highest quality living environment and also an effective method to avoid corruption," said Andro Mand, president of the Union of Estonian Architects.

Olena Oliynyk, from the Union of Architects of Ukraine, described examining and comparing the projects submitted to the competition as very interesting and said that all of the projects, without exception, were very professional and exciting in nature.

The authors of the design "Hata" by DAGOpen are Oleksii Pakhomov, Jaan Kuusemets, Anna Solts and Oksana Buziak. The design has a strong sense of space and creates a bright and safe feeling of home, according to the jury. The building resembles a traditional Ukrainian dwelling in its form and layout, but is executed in a modern approach. The house is feasible to produce as a prefabricated building, but does not have the effect of a typical prefabricated building.

The winning design also meets a wide range of Davos quality criteria to help ensure that children can grow up in a diverse, high-quality spatial environment

The architectural competition, organized by ESTDEV, the Union of Estonian Architects, and the Estonian Ministry of Culture, is part of a larger cooperation between the Ministry of Culture and ESTDEV, which aims to ensure that the principles of Davos' Baukultur Quality System are upheld throughout the reconstruction of Ukraine.