Ukraine has a plethora of decaying industrial facilities. Recently, some of them have been given a second life.
These buildings, which once housed groaning machinery, are being remodeled into art centers, coworking spaces, offices, restaurants, creative industries and parks.
Although Europe and the U.S. have been renovating abandoned industrial buildings for decades, Ukraine is only beginning to master this practice.
Many Ukrainian cities have already begun preserving local architectural and cultural heritage. Most of these projects are in Kyiv, such as innovation park UNIT.City, Closer art center, creative space IZONE, and Art-zavod Platforma.
But there are also projects in other cities, such as innovation center Promprylad.Renovation in Ivano-Frankivsk, creative space !FESTrepublic in Lviv, and entertainment center Adrenalin City in Lutsk.
Promprylad.Renovation
This old factory of industrial equipment in western Ukraine’s Ivano-Frankivsk, 450 kilometers southwest of Kyiv, has been reborn as the innovation center Promprylad.Renovation.
The space now hosts a dance studio, a gallery of contemporary art, an art workshop, a multimedia laboratory, children’s clubs, local business offices, a restaurant, a coworking space, printers, a recycling laboratory, a brewery, an urban laboratory and even an office of the city’s investment policy department.
Yuriy Fylyuk, the CEO of the Promprylad project, had always been engaged in the city’s development. At first, he opened public restaurant Urban Space 100, with investments from 100 entrepreneurs, 80% of whose income goes to finance city projects.
“We have tried from the beginning to build a healthy dialogue of interaction in the triangle of business, local government and civil society,” Fylyuk told the Kyiv Post.
Promprylad became a continuation of social initiatives in the city. It is a striking example of impact investment, which means investment in a social project by several people who later become its co-owners and receive dividends.
As of April 2021, the project brought together a vast community of almost 800 investors from 28 countries, who have contributed more than $8.0 million to the project. Promprylad. Renovation also raised more than $888,700 in grant funds.
FEST Republic
In 2015, the Lviv network of creative projects called Holding of emotions !FEST bought the abandoned Halychsklo plant, which used to make glass pharmaceutical containers, and turned it into the multifunctional creative space !FESTrepublic.
!FEST is known for creating well-known restaurant chains, including Lviv Chocolate Manufacture, Lviv Coffee Mine, and the wine bar Drunk Cherry.
The former Halychsklo factory now hosts Ukrainian clothing brand Aviatsiya Halychyny, a bakery, the Pravda brewery, a coffee hub, the rib restaurant Rebernia, a club, a warehouse and a charging station for electric cars.
The Old Lion Publishing House, a famous Ukrainian book publisher, is also headquartered in !FESTrepublic. The external facade of the publishing house building resembles a large bookshelf.
Many people come to !FESTrepublic for the Craft Beer & Vinyl Music Festival, which happens twice a year in May and September, gathering more than 50 craft breweries from all over Ukraine. Last September, more than 10,000 people attended the festival over three days.
The creators try to preserve the authenticity of the plant as much as possible. “Every revitalized building in Ukraine has its own signature style,” Andriy Khudo, 42, one of the co-founders, told the Kyiv Post. “We did not copy, but adapted what we can on this territory.”
Art-zavod Platforma
Art-zavod Platforma (Platforma Art Factory) was one of the first factory-turned-art-spaces in Ukraine.
Platforma is a former silk factory that now hosts street food, music festivals, fairs, parties, performances and charity events. Founded in 2014, the platform soon launched the first street food festival Ulichnaya Eda. Later, it hosted the first Ukrainian music festival, Atlas Weekend, as well as the Kurazh charity markets.
About 20,000 people visit the factory every weekend during the warm season. It still hosts the largest comics and cosplay festival in the country, Ukraine Comic Con, and the family charity festival Charity Weekend.
“We tried to keep everything as original as possible,” Andrii Fedorov, the CEO of City Capital Group, which opened Art-zavod Platforma, told the Kyiv Post.
The facades of many buildings on the territory of the art factory are decorated with murals by Ukrainian artists.
Platforma combines a large co-working area, a local manufacturing area, Ukrainian fashion designers’ studios, a gallery, and shops that produce coffee and beer.
“We are trying to create a space for creative youth who would be representatives of the creative economy, because they are our future,” Fedorov said.
Urban CAD
In 2017, Vitalii Bielobrov decided to revitalize Kherson, a city 550 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, by opening the city’s first art space inside an old combine plant.
Now Urban CAD is a place for festivals, lectures, business incubators of social entrepreneurship and film screenings.
“The main idea of Urban CAD is to create a gathering point for creative people and to make a tourist attraction,” Bielobrov told the Kyiv Post.
It all started with 11 co-investors who chipped in $1,000 each.
Urban CAD works only during the warm season: from May to September, attracting about 10,000 visitors per season. There are four types of events that the space hosts: cultural, charitable, developmental and socially useful. Last season in 2020, Urban CAD held 155 events, according to Bielobrov.
The eve of the season opening is community work day, when locals come to prepare the space. “It is important for people to be involved and their support is important to us, and so we show that this is a project of all city residents,” Bielobrov said.
Urban CAD confidently states that Kherson is a worthy tourist destination.
Izone
The history of Izone first began in Donetsk.
An abandoned factory in industrial Donetsk, which used to make insulation materials, was turned into a giant art space called Isolation in 2010. But just two years later, its creators were forced to abandon it when Russia invaded the region. The original Isolation is now used as a prison by the Russian-sponsored militants.
The creators of the art space moved to Kyiv and revitalized another industrial facility on the site of the Kyiv Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Plant on the Dnipro. This became the Izone creative space.
Since then, Izone has become a second home for more than 30 professionals and teams representing creative industries and innovative businesses. It’s a location for conferences and a platform for performances and concerts, creative workshops, art galleries, studios, as well as shops and cafes.
Mykhailo Glubokyi, 35, Izone’s Development Manager, said that now Izone helps develop the fashion industry, hosting Ukrainian stylist Julie Pelipas’ startup Better which sells clothes made completely from used apparel, as well as Ukrainian nightwear label Sleeper.
Glubokyi also said that the Izone team plans to expand across Ukraine, especially in small towns with “a program specifically targeted at the local community.”
Adrenalin City
The Adrenalin City cultural and entertainment complex in Lutsk, Volyn oblast, 400 kilometers west of Kyiv, was also built inside an abandoned factory that used to make leather cardboard.
Viktor Korsak, the founder of 18 businesses in various sectors of the economy, created Adrenalin City in 2008.
Nowadays, around 8,000 people visit Adrenalin each month, according to Korsak. It combines a museum of modern Ukrainian art, an interactive museum of science and technology, a restaurant-museum of Polissya cuisine, an art coworking space, a children’s play center, an art hostel, the Adrenalin Hotel, a racetrack, as well as a rentable area for local manufacturers.
Adrenalin also hosts a center for medical innovation and a prototyping laboratory where a young Ukrainian startup is developing.
On August 24, 2018, the founder’s family opened a Museum of Contemporary Ukrainian Art named after Korsak. The 5,000 square meter museum has more than 4,500 pieces of art from 100 Ukrainian artists in its collection.
“I saw that there is no museum of modern art in Ukraine and decided to make one,” Korsak told the Kyiv Post.
