An American of Galician descent says coming to Ukraine has been like coming home
Leading up to the Post’s 10th birthday this fall, each week we’ll be highlighting members of the local business community who have played leading roles over the years. This week, we talk to architect Roman Shwed.
“Oh, and don’t forget to mention that we’re organizing a Rotary Club in English soon,” said architect Roman Shwed after an interview in the Drum, the downtown bar that’s a favorite of many ex-pats.
Shwed, an American of Galician descent, has a life story that in the beginning, at least, is typical of members of the Ukrainian Diaspora in the West. Born in Lviv just before World War II started, the 65-year-old Shwed remembers begging for food in the displaced persons camps in which so many Ukrainian war refugees lived. Then came refuge in the West: a crowded boat trip to the United States and settlement in Philadelphia, a major destination for Ukrainian immigrants at the time.
Like so many Diaspora families, his own carefully preserved its ethnic identity.
“In the dining room we would always have a tryzub [the Ukrainian national emblem] on the wall. Underneath was the Lviv emblem and then Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko and Lesya Ukrainka. My friends used to come over and look at these portraits and say ‘Your family?’ and I’d say ‘Yep.’ So I thought I lived in Lviv no matter where I was.”
His childhood memories of his refugee ship’s arrival in New York Harbor are cinematic.
“I remember my father waking me up at six o’clock in the morning. We walked out on the deck and there’s the Statue of Liberty coming right out of the water. It was really, really great, the kind of thing you always remember.”
Coming home
In 1994, Shwed had long been established as an architect, in Florida. Then a friend, also a Ukrainian-American, asked him to participate in an architectural project in Ukraine.
“When I arrived [in Ukraine] I thought I’d get teary eyes, kneel down, kiss the ground, do all that. And I got off the plane, looked around and said: ‘Hey, I’m at home.’ It was a homecoming for me.”
“I came here because a friend of mine was redoing a dacha…. It was Shcherbitsky’s dacha in Pushcha Vodytsya,” he says, referring to the notorious Brezhnev-era head of Ukraine’s Communist Party.
“No one really knows much about it. I know everything about it. ‘Cause I was the guy that made the dacha happen.”
The dream, says Shwed, was to make those 11 acres of resort land and the lovely buildings on them into something like Camp David for the Ukrainian government. It never happened, but the project made the pages of the prestigious U.S. magazine Architectural Digest, Shwed remembers.
Staying on
After the Shcherbitsky dacha project was done, Shwed decided to stay in Kyiv.
“I enjoy the place, I think the people are great, and I just feel comfortable here,” he says. “It’s interesting and dynamic. Things are always happening.”
“I am basically retired now,” he continues, adding that he still does some architectural projects in Ukraine and stays active. “Not to make a big deal of my age, but at my age in America it’s hard to get hired, because you’re supposed to be retired.”
His experience as an architect is often in demand in Ukraine, especially when the country’s economy started growing and, with it, people’s desire to build.
He’s often invited to work as a consultant on renovation projects, such as the U.S.-based New Century Holding’s reconstruction of the Lybid Hotel, and does work for private clients. Orders come from Russia as well as Ukraine.
“People call me and say ‘Roman, you have to do this one’….We did a nice apartment on Volodymyrska in that big building where Sofiyska Brama is…I’ve done a penthouse apartment in Moscow, and the owner was very happy with it.”
Right now he works with Kyiv’s VIL-147 design bureau. “It’s a fun group to work with,” he says. “And I’m just an overall nice guy there.”
“There’s need for my talent. People appreciate what I do and I get a chance to share a Western approach to design,” Shwed says about his work in Ukraine. A private house that he recently designed on Zverinitska, he says, looks like it naturally belongs to the city, unlike the nouveau riche mansions in Koncha Zaspa.
“Architecture is a very delicate thing. People don’t understand how delicate it is, and that’s why we have some of the monstrosities that we find in Kyiv right now,” Shwed says. “Not that the buildings are bad. They’re just in the wrong place.”
The Diaspora radio
Shwed is also dabbling in broadcasting, hosting a radio show on Ukrainian National Radio. The station broadcasts his program “Vidrodgennya” (Renais-sance) every Thursday.
“It’s a group therapy thing for me and I enjoy it,” Shwed laughs, “I talk about the Diaspora, since that’s what I am. I play Ukrainian groups from Canada, from the States, from England, Germany, Poland. I play music, and I talk, I bullshit. It’s mostly nonsense. It’s an ego trip for me.”
Shwed spends his own money to transfer music from vinyl to disc so he can play it on the show, but he doesn’t mind. He feels he’s involved in an important bit of cultural outreach, since native Ukrainians tend to know little about the Diaspora and how it lives.
Shwed has completed about 70 live broadcasts, and has earned a following. “It’s a lot of adrenaline,” he says.
Kyiv’s Rotary Club has been another of Shwed’s hobby for six years now. The club helps orphanages, organizes cultural exchange programs and does a lot of charity work in Kyiv. Shwed is currently working on organizing an English-Language Rotary Club. And after that?
“I’d love to do a Ukrainian talk-show on Ukrainian television, like at 11 o’clock, kind of Jay Leno. Something that could be fun…. It’s a dream, but hey, radio was a dream too.”
Marriage and cigarettes
When he came to Ukraine, Shwed was divorced. His met his next wife in the lobby of the Natsionalny hotel, where she was selling souvenirs during the dark days of the mid-1990’s.
“I fell in love with her eyes,” Shwed says, admitting that though he dated a lot, he was by that time tired of coming home to an empty apartment. They got married in 1999. Now Shwed and his wife travel to Florida, where the winters are somewhat more pleasant than they are in Kyiv. His 24-year-old son from his first marriage visits him in Ukraine, and even spent a year in Kyiv studying at Pechersk International School, which, as Shwed puts it, “cost more than sending him to a private school in Florida.” Now Shwed says his son wants to come and live in Ukraine.
As for himself, Shwed is here to stay.
“This is really the place,” he says. “I am going travel a lot, but I’m going to stay in Ukraine for the rest of my life.”
