Young Heritage and the Problem of Value: Rethinking Soviet Architecture

The conversation attempts to shift the focus from an emotional rejection of Soviet architecture toward its analytical reading.

This is not only about the Kharkiv Regional State Administration building (KhODA), but about a broader question: how do we define the value of “young heritage”? That is, heritage for which the temporal distance of perception has not yet been achieved. According to international logic, at least three generations are needed to remove the emotional layer and begin to perceive an object as a historical source. We are still inside this process; therefore, evaluations oscillate between rejection and attempts at reinterpretation.

The key thesis of the discussion is that the value of architecture cannot be reduced to “like / dislike”.

Value may be:
– material (quality of construction, durability),
– artistic (level of design and craftsmanship),
– scientific (as a carrier of continuous historical information).

Buildings register not only forms, but also modes of thinking of an эпоха (the author does not use this wording explicitly, but the context implies: the intellectual and cultural framework of a period): a post-war belief in “eternity”, different attitudes toward materials, toward the future, and toward the role of architecture itself.

A separate line of the discussion is the critique of “simplified labels”. What is commonly referred to as “Stalinist Empire style” in fact consists of different periods and approaches, which cannot be reduced to a single ideological category. Architecture is not identical to ideology, even when it emerges within its framework.

In this sense, another question arises: do we have the right to reject these objects, if it is precisely through them that we are able to understand previous generations?