Architects Plan a City for the Future in Ukraine, While Bombs Still Fall

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/07/magazine/ukraine-rebuild-irpin.html

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In the final few days of February, as the Russian Army advanced toward Kyiv, Ukrainian forces blew up the Irpin bridge, ripping open its latticed metal insides so that their edges buckled and curled. A suburb of Kyiv, Irpin was the last city that the Russian Army would have had to conquer to reach the capital; the bridge provided the fastest route from the city center to the Kyiv ring road. “It was the main bridge that stopped the invasion of Kyiv,” says Slava Balbek, a Ukrainian architect who is volunteering as a drone operator with territorial defense forces. “It’s like if you cut your arm off so the rest of your body will be saved.”

Irpin was retaken on March 28, one month and a day after the invasion. They retreated north toward Belarus, leaving a trail of devastation in their wake. Their tank tracks still mark the asphalt on the highways. In Irpin, gleaming modern apartment buildings were incinerated; residential homes reduced to rubble; schools shelled, burned and flooded. Destroying the bridge prevented further Russian advances, but it also deprived Ukrainian civilians of their primary escape route, trapping them in the line of fire.

Defense forces collected spare planks and driftwood to quickly fashion an improvised path across the freezing water. Some were killed while making the crossing. Others were hit by artillery fire on their way to the bridge, or as they hurried toward the buses that were waiting for them on the other side. Their deaths are marked by rudimentary wooden crosses fashioned from pieces of debris and driftwood and nailed to the railings. The first cross went up while Russian soldiers were still in Irpin, camped out in school dormitories and residential basements, their tanks parked in apartment courtyards and private driveways. The rest went up quietly, anonymously, once the Russians were gone. Approximately 300 residents died during the occupation; about 200 are still unaccounted for.

Mikhail Sapon, the 30-year-old chief municipal architect of Irpin, watched the Russian retreat from his home north of the city. He had been shot on the fourth day of the occupation, when he emerged from the basement where he and his family were hiding to drive to the store for some food and medical supplies. His windshield and the driver’s side of his car were riddled with bullet holes. A week later, his best friend was killed on a similar outing. When Sapon went to take his friend’s body to a cemetery, a Russian checkpoint tried to stop him: “They said: ‘Why is he here?’ ‘Who killed him?’” he recalled. “And we said, ‘You did.’”

On a recent Friday afternoon, Sapon walked beneath the shattered remains of the Irpin bridge, his hands in his pockets, his gaze toward the river, its bend now rudely exposed to the sky. Behind him, workers cut steel strips for the frame of the new bridge that is under construction, the materials provided by a Turkish company, the cranes, drills and tractors all on loan from Istanbul. A cold rain bore down upon the river, but Sapon did not even hunch his shoulders.

“Now, standing under the rain, it’s not comfortable, but nobody is shooting at you, you are not in a hurry,” he said. “Imagine that there is a crowd of people here, and the bridge is too narrow, no one can escape. From the left-hand side, you are hearing bombs, kids are screaming, people are holding their pets, and you all have to walk through this path.”

Today Sapon is in charge of overseeing the reconstruction of not only the Irpin bridge but the entire city. The Russian invasion obliterated much of Irpin’s civilian infrastructure: Attacks blew out thousands of residential windows, collapsed roofs, eviscerated heating systems and destroyed the water filtration system. The Central House of Culture, the public market, the hospitals and the stadium were shelled. All of them would somehow need to be restored. “During this month, we started counting all the damage, scanning everything with drones,” Sapon told me. “We realized that 70 percent was destroyed, that the bridges were gone, all the kindergartens are damaged.” He is working with Irpin’s mayor, Oleksandr Markushin, and the executive director of the Irpin Reconstruction Fund (and a former mayor), Volodymyr Karpluk, to restore the city even as rolling blackouts and energy cuts remind residents that more pain is still to come.

Ukrainian defense forces blew up the Irpin bridge in the first week of the full-scale invasion in an effort to cut off one of the main entry points into Kyiv and prevent the Russian Army from advancing toward the capital. In doing so, they also destroyed the primary civilian escape route; a ramshackle path of wooden planks was hastily assembled to help residents cross to safety and reach the road to Kyiv. The destroyed bridge is slated to become a memorial to the Ukrainian Army’s victory in the Kyiv region. The architecture firm Balbek Bureau submitted a proposal for the memorial that seeks to preserve the site’s fractured state as much as possible, allowing visitors to observe the symbolic crossing from a series of minimalist viewing platforms.

In Irpin, as in many cities and villages that Russia has targeted in war zones from Syria to Ukraine, genocidal violence was accompanied by urbicidal destruction. According to the city government, 119 high-rise apartment buildings and 1,483 private homes sustained significant damage; 16,358 residents were left homeless. The city aims to replace 15,600 residential windows by January yet faces a shortage of glass, steel, lumber and other building materials. In total, 885 buildings were destroyed, and over 12,000 were damaged. The city estimates that it needs at least 50 million euros to prepare for winter, which has already arrived in Ukraine, and one billion euros to completely rebuild.

Iryna Yarmolenko, an Irpin resident and Bucha City Council member who evacuated abroad with her son, first to Poland and then to France, watched the devastation from afar. In consultation with Sapon and Markushin, she put together an open call for Ukrainian architects, designers and urban planners to come to Irpin and develop proposals for how the city should rebuild. By July, submissions were already flowing in, and Yarmolenko had extended the call to foreign architects. Some plans reimagined Irpin’s architectural landmarks as gleaming modernist complexes, with monumental glass additions supporting whatever facades could still be saved. They were expensive, ambitious designs, experiments in conceiving of a future still to come, a future radically unlike the past.

Fewer than half of Irpin’s citizens came back in the first month after the Russians left. Sapon said that the city still feels empty; the sporadic street life that has returned only seemed to underscore the extent of the damage. Around virtually every corner, civilians can be seen patching their own roofs, securing their windows and carting out rubble in wheelbarrows. But as Iryna Matsevko, a historian and deputy vice chancellor at the Kharkiv School of Architecture, explained to me, the rebuilding of Ukrainian cities has become an industry unto itself, attracting high-profile architects from all over the world. The attention is a blessing and a curse: It can bring investment and international airtime, but it also risks diminishing the role Ukrainians play in the reconstruction. In Irpin, Sapon and Yarmolenko are trying to ensure that their city reaps the benefits of international attention without getting lost in a swirl of good will.

Because Irpin was one of the first Ukrainian cities to be destroyed and liberated, it is also one of the first places to make a full accounting of its losses and begin making plans for the future. The reconstruction of Irpin may one day serve as a template — or a cautionary tale — for the eventual rebuilding of larger cities like Kharkiv, Kherson and Mariupol. The city has become something of a laboratory for working through the array of concerns confronting Ukraine as it rebuilds: balancing the nation’s wartime footing with theoretical plans for peace; reconciling citizens’ immediate desire to return to normalcy with the careful planning necessary to effectively reconstruct; weighing ambitions to memorialize the war against residents’ needs for warm homes as the Ukrainian winter sets in. Once known for its placid riverbank and parks, Irpin has instead become known as a symbol of the misfortune visited upon Ukrainians. It is hardly the first place to occupy this uncomfortable position, but it is trying to be the first place not to lose sight of itself along the way.

Sapon and his colleagues are keenly aware of the unfortunate league of devastated cities to which Irpin now belongs. “How to reconstruct a city in the proper way after the war? Warsaw in 1943, London in World War II, these are big cities — there’s a big difference between the square footage of the city, and the amount of citizens,” Sapon told me as we walked past Irpin’s destroyed House of Culture and toward the city’s soccer stadium. There, he bent down and showed me how to pick pieces of metal shrapnel out of a mine crater, how to identify fragments of a Russian bomb. “Of course, we have to remind people of what happened here with memorial places, but if you want to reconstruct a building, you have to do everything to not mention what happened,” he said. “People have to move forward, they have to live in peace.”

Until 2014, Irpin was little more than a country village. That year, Russia invaded Ukraine’s eastern territories and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians from their homes, many of whom moved to the Kyiv suburbs. Veterans returning from eastern battles were awarded parcels of land or apartments as thanks for their service. “A lot of them came here,” Sapon said. “On the one hand, it was a challenge, how to provide for them, but on the other hand it was a big honor, because they chose this city to live in.” To accommodate the new residents, brand-new multistory apartment complexes with names like the Green Life and the Rich Town soon went up. Irpin adopted a new motto, “City for Life,” and earned a reputation as a comfortable middle-class suburb.

In Matsevko’s mind, the reconstruction of the Balkans after the Bosnian war is an instructive precedent for Ukraine. Well-meaning organizations and foreign governments arrived with their own plans and strategies for rebuilding and their own expectations for how their work would be received, without adequate consideration of local contexts and histories. In Sarajevo, the newly established municipal government received millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan and Kuwait to build mosques and Islamic centers, but it could not raise comparable funds to rebuild the city’s factories and other critical infrastructure. Everyone seemed to want Sarajevo to become a symbol of something — of reconciliation, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, nonalignment, privatization, new urbanism — and no sum of money would be enough to reconcile these competing visions in a society that was fragmented and grieving after a half decade of war. “Already, we are seeing how international institutions are coming to Ukraine and pursuing the same strategies that will lead to failure,” Matsevko says.

“In some ways, talking about destruction is the least interesting thing,” Haris Piplas, a Sarajevo-born architect and urban designer with the firm Drees & Sommer who advises the Union of Architects of Ukraine, told me. After the siege of Sarajevo, as after the invasion of Irpin, images of urban destruction circulated globally, stirring an outpouring of concern and support. Renzo Piano proposed a design for a contemporary art museum that was shelved for over a decade and resurrected only this fall; M.I.T. dispatched its students to come up with new building ideas; the famous American architect Lebbeus Woods made futuristic renderings of a Sarajevo apartment block and its electrical management building.

But a lack of central planning led to an ad hoc reconstruction that was corrupted and uncoordinated. Refugees who had their homes destroyed were pushed into temporary shelters on the mountain slopes outside the city center, while international aid groups pursued their own plans for rebuilding individual structures. The outcome, Piplas details in his 2019 doctoral thesis, “Non-Aligned City,” was a chaotic race to reconstruct Sarajevo in the image of its varied benefactors. Laborers, materials and administrators were in short supply. The city did not yet have the infrastructure in place for a successful rebuild.

Irpin is already awash in international aid and interest. The reconstruction is being undertaken in phases; only after all essential services are restored and stabilized, and residents supplied with windows and heating systems, will the city turn toward realizing grander proposals. The Japanese architect Hiroki Matsuura, who is based in Rotterdam, has begun researching a comprehensive master plan for Irpin, though it is not clear that it will be accepted. The Milanese architect Stefano Boeri, who was part of a team that designed schools and hospitals in Pristina, Kosovo, has also joined the project.

For now, though, the reconstruction plan is happening in piecemeal fashion. Volunteers have identified the sites most in need of repair, including the House of Culture, the public library, the local museum and the old market, as well as various private homes and larger apartment blocks. Each project has been given a preliminary price tag; an English-language brochure outlines the damage to each for the benefit of potential funders. You can scroll through Irpin’s decimated infrastructure in the same way that you might flip through a catalog. This is a strategic choice and a revealing one: The team understands all too well that they cannot count on international good will alone to survive. To receive the funds they need, they need to market their own averted obliteration.

UNICEF has funded construction of bomb shelters underneath school buildings; the International Red Cross is financing the rebuilding of several residential roofs; the Portuguese city Cascais is financing the rebuilding of one kindergarten, and Poland is providing funds for a new temporary shelter. Sapon, Yarmolenko and Markushin are in the delicate position of soliciting and welcoming the diverse forms of assistance, allocating and apportioning the good will and reconciling outside visions with those of local architects. Several Ukrainian architectural teams submitted designs for the House of Culture, which had everything but its Soviet neo-Classical-style entrance destroyed. The city estimates that the cost of rebuilding it will amount to at least 15 million euros. One bureau encased the facade in glass but replaced the building’s burned body with an austere, two-story, marble-white design. Another team suggested that its double-columned vestibule should be paired with a futuristic, circular glass appendage. Each design sought to preserve what it could of Irpin’s past, replacing only the unsalvageable portions with their imaginations of the physical contours of Ukraine’s liberated future.

The Irpin bridge remains similarly suspended in a state of managed disrepair. Soldiers man the military checkpoint before it, their eyes searching cars that pass by. On one side of the broken overpass, workers are assembling the new bridge. On the other side, a temporary bypass allows traffic to crawl through. In between is the chasm, the makeshift path that has been described as both the “road of life” and the “bridge of death.” In April, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the Irpin bridge would become a memorial complex, preserved in its fractured state in order to “always remind all generations of our people of the brutal and senseless invasion Ukraine has been able to fend off.” He declared that Irpin was a “Hero City” of Ukraine — a World War II-era title awarded to cities that displayed exemplary courage in the fight or that suffered in particular and spectacular ways. Several architectural bureaus submitted proposals, including Balbek Bureau, Slava Balbek’s firm, which took an approach of “super minimalism,” designed to expose and preserve the existing zone of destruction without significantly altering the space. Their proposal would have all the existing objects there — the wooden planks, the overturned car, the abandoned strollers — 3-D-scanned, archived, preserved and repositioned exactly as they were left, a technique that Balbek described as “invisible architecture.” The improvised wooden path would look exactly as it does today, but the planks would be stabilized and visitors forbidden to walk upon them. Instead, they would observe the bridge from several fortified observation decks, including a low platform at the same level where the evacuees stood, under fire, waiting to make the crossing.

The overall goal is to intervene as little as possible, to memorialize without destroying or disturbing the land. A few months ago, Balbek received a call from an unknown number: It was the owner of an abandoned white van asking for his car back. Balbek told him that the car is now a symbol and cannot be reclaimed. He offered to compensate the owner for the loss.

Irpin was established in the 19th century as a stopover town on the train route to Kyiv from the nearby city Kovel. The city’s old, open-air market is a relic of this history, a public gathering space that has outlived two empires. It was largely destroyed during the Russian invasion; today the only stalls that did not catch fire — a small number of vegetable, meat, fish and fruit stands — are open for regular business. Toward the back of the market, what was once a crowded maze of small shops is now a vast empty space. Some stalls survived but were burned inside and out; others have yet to be reopened, their proprietors having fled. Most of the clientele and vendors are elderly.

As with many sites throughout the city, the market presents an opportunity for Irpin to rid itself of outdated Soviet architecture. Sapon is overseeing the conversion of the market into a public space called Freedom Square, a transition that will involve moving the food stalls to a brand-new space along the embankment boardwalk, which is already under construction. As with the House of Culture, three separate architectural firms have submitted designs for the new space, each proposal derived from a distinct imagination of what “freedom” means for Irpin. Two bureaus outfitted the square with a monument to freedom at its center, while one bureau, the Kyiv-based Project Seven, anchored it with a small arbor of pine trees instead.

“Everyone has their own idea of freedom, and in this space, people can practice freedom however they like,” Yevheniia Wasilovska, Project Seven’s head architect, told me over coffee with her team in Irpin. Her bureau’s rendering includes an outdoor amphitheater, a minimalist fountain and a broad overhead walkway that shelters a small commercial space. On one side of the square, an iron enclosure in a Richard Serra-like style houses a basketball court, and on the other, greenery adorns pedestrian paths.

The Project Seven team walked me over to the old market. It was late afternoon, and vendors were beginning to close up shop. As we ducked between the stalls, Anna Kochuch, another designer on the project, told me that as far as she sees it, monuments are a Soviet concept, and erecting one in the new Freedom Square would risk undermining the organizing premise of the space. “Freedom is about normal life, normal work,” her colleague Serhii Rusanov explained. “Irpin is the first place to think about how to reorganize the city, how to make it more comfortable, how to make people’s lives better.”

We stood in the middle of the market, our backs to the still-operating stalls, observing the abandoned ones before us. I tried to imagine what it would look like should their proposal become a reality: What was now a barren field of burned metal and concrete would become a green modernist walkway. Hipsters would pass the time at the open-air cafe, and families would push strollers past gleaming shop windows. The Project Seven vision reminded me of London’s revitalized Granary Square, a formerly depressed area next to King’s Cross Station that now hosts an airy restaurant space, a small open-air shopping center and a green amphitheater. The transformation of both sites, already realized in London but only aspired to in Irpin, allows visitors to experience a very specific kind of freedom: that of being able to navigate a clean, capitalist space.

These ambitions belie some of the fundamental challenges facing the reconstruction effort. Anna Kyrii, a Kyivan architect who has been tapped to redesign an Irpin secondary school, told me that she speaks at at least two reconstruction summits per week. For the moment, these discussions rarely translate into actions. “There is a lot of blah blah blah, and absolutely no money,” she told me. On her computer screen, she walked me through her renderings of the reconstructed school, which she designed as a state-of-the-art academic and athletic complex, complete with dormitories to house Ukrainian and international teachers. Even if she started tomorrow, she said, it would take a minimum of two years for the project to be completed because of a shortage of construction materials, the production of which is largely based in Ukraine’s eastern regions. Thermal insulation materials are being sourced from Zhitomyr and plaster board from Donetsk, regions that have been partly occupied and under constant threat of military action. Rusanov told me that Ukrainian construction projects previously sourced all their steel from the Azovstal factory in Mariupol, where the last Ukrainian defenders of that city were taken captive in May. Now steel has to be brought in from Poland and Turkey, shipped by land and sea at far greater cost.

Kyrii told me that “two years is a very long time for young children — if they leave, it will be harder to get them back.” She was absolutely clear that, for now, her design is just an idea. “Architects are very happy people,” she told me. “This is our therapy.” But so long as her plans for the school remain virtual, so too will the operations of its teachers and students, who have been holding classes online for the entire school year.

Ro3kvit, a new coalition of architects, urban planners and artists formed after this year’s invasion, is uniquely attuned to the challenges of rebuilding under conditions of war. Founded by the Kharkiv School of Architecture’s Oleg Drozdov and his longtime colleague Fulco Treffers, an Amsterdam-based architect, the coalition is composed of an equal number of Ukrainian and foreign experts. They are already speaking with city and regional governments, including Bucha, Zaporizhzhia and Mariupol, to advise on the reconstruction effort, and have broken ground on a temporary housing unit for internally displaced people. Ro3kvit is at once part of the Ukrainian reconstruction industry and a response to it, an effort to avoid duplication and democratize the process. They are currently researching how to pursue “circular building” — how to reuse war debris, how to determine who owns what pile of rubble and who might be willing to provide the heavy machinery to reprocess it. “The whole world wants to help, but someone needs to take the lead,” Treffers says.

Having these discussions with city leaders is also a way of helping the reality of what has happened slowly sink in: When residents of Mariupol told him that they wanted to fix one of the trolley bus lines, he realized that they did not yet understand that there are no trolley buses in Mariupol anymore, and that the old transit lines are gone.

Irpin’s old market before the full-scale invasion, in a reproduction based on a rendering by Vovk + Partners Architects. It was a local gathering place, the site of a series of fruit, meat and vegetable stalls. Today over half the site has been destroyed. Some stalls survived but were burned inside and out; others have yet to be reopened, their proprietors having fled the city. A proposed plan to rebuild the site of the market — Project Seven’s, whose rendering was the basis for the reproduction shown here. After Irpin’s municipal leaders announced their intention to transform the area into a public space called Freedom Square, several Ukrainian architecture firms submitted proposals for how the site might be remade.

In the architectural renderings, Irpin is populated, clean and seemingly wealthy. There are no mine craters or shrapnel holes, no energy shortages. The designs stand in stark contrast to the images of the city’s destruction that have been circulating in international media, most of which depict a neighborhood in Irpin’s northeast corner, which bore the brunt of Russia’s attack. There, apartment buildings with bay windows and new terraces are now little more than charred skeletons: their concrete facades exploded to reveal layers of blackened and flaking brick, their roofs incinerated, their interiors gutted. In the months since liberation, a steady stream of Western presidents, ministers, journalists and aid workers have toured the neighborhood. The week I was there, Defense Minister Lorenzo Guerini of Italy visited; the previous week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken walked the streets and signed the city flag. The visitors’ presence has ensured that Irpin enjoys international attention, and also that images of its destruction are disseminated the world over.

Even as the city has become an international symbol of devastation, life is quietly returning to its neighborhoods and apartment blocks. When I visited the Everest condominium complex on a Saturday morning in September, residents were gathered in their courtyard for a meeting. Twelve stories tall, the complex stands next to the train tracks, between the two main avenues that Russian forces took into the city. Missiles tore into apartments. Mines landed on the courtyard playground. Since March, the residents have taken it upon themselves to fix things up. As soon as they were able to return, they formed a unit to patrol the complex at night, and they took shifts cleaning up the roof and repairing the windows. In the playground, which had been rived by shrapnel, they filled in the holes and repainted the swings and monkey bars as best they could. But they did not have the means, or the time, to fix everything.

Olena Iampolska, an engineer with the Irpin Reconstruction Summit, stood in the center of the courtyard. She introduced herself, explaining that she was part of a group of volunteers working to rebuild the city. “Our immediate assignment is to restore the building so that you can get through the winter,” she told them. “So that means, the first thing is the windows, doors, the heating system, the roof — everything you need to live here.” She explained that resources for the restoration had been secured from the United Nations, via the humanitarian organization Terre des Hommes. Enzo Dell’Acqua, a field coordinator for the organization, stood beside her and addressed the residents. The United Nations had pledged $700,000 for the repair of the complex, he said, promising that they would work hard to restore the building by the first few weeks of December.

Oksana Serhiienko, the 39-year-old chairwoman of the apartment association, raised her hand. She and her husband own two units in the building. She told Iampolska that they had already started repairing the windows and the roof, and that they had started their own website requesting funds for the restoration. How would the two efforts work in parallel? Her questions were searching, not hostile: As leader of the association, she understood that the residents could not raise the funds to fix the building all by themselves. She didn’t want to see all their hard work undone, though. With cold weather descending quickly, Serhiienko’s top priority was to make sure that they could all survive the winter together.

Later in the meeting, a resident named Ksenia Yesypovcyn, 42, raised her hand and asked how they would be able to do the repairs under continuing threat of missile strikes. Dell’Acqua responded that, usually, his organization didn’t encounter that problem where they worked. “Good for you,” remarked a woman shivering next to me.

Her name was Oksana, she told me, explaining that her unit did not currently have windows. With no windows, heating could not be installed. “This is all great, of course, but I’m not sure we can wait for this help, because it’s already cold,” she said. “It’s not realistic to wait until December, so we will try to do it ourselves.”

She was grateful but frustrated: The outside help was welcome, but it would not change anything for her and her family that day or the next. They needed new windows and warm homes now, not at some indeterminate point in the future. Already, Markushin has created public “heating points” for residents to warm up while they wait for their houses to be fixed. And even when Everest is fully restored, residents might not have heat and electricity for a different reason: Russia’s ongoing attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure mean that the entire nation is already rationing and bracing themselves for what looks to be a brutal winter ahead. The attacks on the energy supply are a subtler and slower-moving kind of assault, the kind that deliberately undermines the hard-won feelings of security and triumph that the summer months brought. One woman whose entire house was destroyed in Irpin told me that “for the rest of their lives, everyone who has lived through this will live with the fear of what will happen if they come here once more.” Yet they also understood that, for many Ukrainians, there was no summer respite, no return home.

“What you are seeing here in Irpin, this is nothing,” a resident named Iryna Mazuryk, 35, told me. She and her husband were almost unfazed by the damage to their building — they saw it as a price that they were more than willing to pay to win the war, and they understood that thousands of Ukrainian civilians have had it far worse. Mazuryk told me that a friend of hers had fled from the Donbas region and told her that where she came from, nothing is left — the cities will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. Another friend, from Hostomel, had lived in a basement under occupation and began taking a sedative to stay calm. “First, we need to win, and then we need more money,” Mazuryk told me. As far as she was concerned, it wasn’t the right time to be discussing a new design for the House of Culture or to build a memorial at the bridge. “Give us five HIMARS, we will rebuild the House of Culture ourselves,” her husband said, referring to the U.S.-made rocket launchers being used by the Ukrainian Army.

A few blocks away, a couple of men worked out on the track of a secondary school — the same one that Kyrii has drawn up plans to rebuild. Mine craters marked the orange rubber, and shrapnel marred the pull-up bars, but it all was still basically functional. Inside was another story: The school’s Lyceum No. 3 had been a humanitarian hub during the invasion. Several missiles bore into the school’s roof and classrooms, leaving entire floors flooded and warped. In early September, President Ursula von der Leyen of the European Commission visited alongside Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, and promised 100 million euros for the reconstruction of Ukrainian schools.

On the first floor, a young history teacher named Oleksandr Kuprienko sat in his classroom, preparing for his next online session. (The school year began with remote instruction.) In the hallways, staff members collected overturned chairs and tables, a first attempt to clear the space for renovation. Teaching materials remained on shelves and tables: Kuprienko showed us textbooks on Ukrainian history and sheets of paper about notable figures like Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and the Ukrainian national bard Taras Shevchenko. When the invasion occurred in February, he had been in the middle of teaching his seventh graders about the foundation of the Cossack state and the prehistory of the Ukrainian national movement. When I asked him how long he will keep teaching online, he said, “at least until the end of the year.”

And then what? I asked. “By then,” Kuprienko said, “we hope we’ll have our school.”

Sometimes Sapon thinks about what would have happened if he had not been quite so lucky — if the bullet that hit him had gone one centimeter to the left or right. He knew several of the men who were killed during the invasion; their names are now written in black marker on the blue-and-yellow sheets that serve as temporary memorials on the Irpin bridge. One of them, Anatoly, a veteran, disappeared on Feb. 26 after driving through a Russian checkpoint. His shot-up car skidded into the forest, and his body was discovered a month after the invasion. His wife was pregnant when the invasion began and recently gave birth to a girl. Another man, Yura, was killed as he tried to fend off the Russian advance. Both men are buried in fresh graves fashioned from sand in the Irpin cemetery, where tractors are still carving out more burial space.

Sapon told me that his favorite place in Irpin is the embankment. He would have his office there if he could. It is bisected by the city’s railway bridge, which was also blown up during the Russian invasion and has now been partly restored. The riverbank is where residents go to relax, to stroll, to escape from the world. The food stand that sells coffee, tea, beer and fresh fish reopened in April. A small footbridge connects the two banks, and though it, too, is marred by shrapnel, the damage is small enough to overlook. Sitting on a bench by the river, you can almost ignore the destruction all around you — if you look only straight ahead, all you can see is an open plain, the calmly flowing water and the Kyiv forest in the distance, which has yet to be de-mined.

If and when construction begins on Balbek’s memorial complex, the embankment path will be extended to encompass the area around the destroyed bridge. Residents will be able to stroll from the food stand to the railway bridge, and from there to the preserved zone of destruction. Already, Ukrainians curious about what Irpin survived and how it became such a symbol of resistance have begun visiting the site. On a sunny Saturday afternoon, a pair of couples who had evacuated from Kharkiv walked arm in arm over the footbridge. They had heard about the evacuation and destruction of Irpin on television and wanted to see the aftermath for themselves. Their city, which preceded Kyiv as the capital of Soviet Ukraine, remains under assault, its historic center demolished. Norman Foster is working with the government on a new master plan for Kharkiv, a development that has been greeted with ambivalence and tempered hostility from Balbek and his Ukrainian colleagues. “ ‘Master plan’ is a word from the 20th century,” Piplas told me. He thinks it’s an outmoded way to envision the world to come. “The illusion that we can predict the future — that’s what a master plan is.”

Walking along the embankment, I came upon a trio of young boys playing on its wooden treehouse. They had all arrived in Irpin recently — their hometown, Marhanets, is across the water from the Russian-occupied nuclear reactor in Zaporizhzhia. One of the boys, a 14-year-old named Nikita, said he liked Irpin very much, that they came to play at the treehouse every day. “It’s quieter here than over there,” he said. They were all attending school online.

Closer to the railroad bridge, two young boys, Gleb and Timur, 13, were fishing. They grew up in Irpin but had evacuated to Poland once the invasion began. They said they had been home for only two weeks, after months and months of going from place to place, and they were relieved to have returned to school in person. “To return to your own house, your room, your own bed, where everything is yours,” Gleb told me, “it’s a feeling that simply can’t be put into words.” He looked over to his friend, turned back toward the river and cast a line back into the flowing water.

Linda Kinstler is the author of “Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends.” Her reporting from Eastern Europe has also appeared in The Atlantic, The Economist, The Guardian and other publications. She is a Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley. Michal Siarek is a Norway-based photographer known for documentary portraits of places and communities. His monograph, “Alexander,” was shortlisted for the Mack First Book Award.The Headway initiative is funded through grants from the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF), with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors serving as a fiscal sponsor. The Woodcock Foundation is a funder of Headway’s public square. Funders have no control over the selection, focus of stories or the editing process and do not review stories before publication. The Times retains full editorial control of the Headway initiative.