Transforming the Architecture of Food

Abstract

Abstract Transforming the Architecture of Food: From the Soviet to the Post-Soviet Apartment focuses on the changes to urban domestic architecture and food-related spaces—those for eating, cooking, and storage—that occurred parallel to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this article, Kateryna Malaia traces a path from standardized Soviet apartment housing built and regulated by the state to the implementation of architectural and spatial solutions by individual apartment dwellers and designers in the post-Soviet years. From the 1980s through the early 2000s, such remodeling projects affected late- and post-Soviet architectural imagination and urban apartments en masse, coinciding with ephemeral yet important changes in domestic practices. To navigate these complex transformations, Malaia questions traditional architectural programmatic labeling—kitchen, dining room, family room, open plan—within the late- and post-Soviet context. Drawing on both archival and popular sources as well as interviews with apartment dwellers, architects, and engineers collected in the post-Soviet urban centers of Kyiv and Lviv in Ukraine, this study shows how the grassroots adaptation of standardized apartment housing at this time echoed new economic and political circumstances. Malaia’s analysis of changes in food-related spaces and practices provides a critical index of the widespread social impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union in everyday architecture and life.