Between “Jewishness” and “Internationality”: Miletsky “School of Kyiv Soviet Modernism”

In recent years, there has been a surge in the popularity of Soviet modernism. The most striking Kyiv phenomenon is a school that has common features with international critical regionalism represented by architects connected with Joseph Karakis, Michael Budilovsky, Abraham Miletsky (all of Jewish origin).

Miletsky is the most famous Ukrainian architect of the second half of the 20th century. After his move to Israel and death in 2004, his influence remains underestimated. Approaches and methods of the Kyiv architects of the Miletsky’s circle are not usually stood out in a movement or school, just as their objects are not distinguished as Jewish heritage.

It can be caused by seemingly contradiction inherent in the architecture of the Modern Movement. Despite the regionalism and environmental approach, their architecture belongs to modernism. Although works of Miletsky and others acquired formal features of postmodernism in the early 1980s, the nature of this architecture remained primarily modernist and carried a social agenda. Thus, the question is raised whether we can talk about Jewishness or Jewish identity in architecture, skipping an appeal to tradition?

Neither essentialism nor the search for elements of traditional architecture in modernism as in a deliberately progressivist movement will answer the question of the Jewish identity of architects and its (non)influence on Soviet architecture. Only an attempt to analyze a thought inherent in the objects and a way of expressing it by means of architecture can make it possible to directly turn to reflection of architects about their Jewish experience. For that very “unique” feature of such architecture is its high narrativeness. And this narration is not an appeal to tradition, not stylization, but an attempt to draw a “consumer of architecture” out, provoking a critical discussion on crucial topics for post-war Jewish architects – trauma, memory, heritage of Kyiv Jews.