The countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have only recently discovered their modern industrial heritage as an object of conservation and future development. Through an in-depth analysis of four industrial sites in Egypt and Iran, testifying to a designated modern era, this article documents the complex historical process of industrialization and its political and economic background. Building on fieldwork, archive studies, workshops, and interviews, the article explores how built structures of modern industrial sites signify the multi-facetted, symbiotic, and exploitative international exchange behind the modernization of economies in the region. In the face of many obstacles to the conservation of this heritage, ranging from incomplete listings and ineffectual policies to high development pressures on urban land, this article aims to transcend the current Eurocentrism in industrial heritage research and practice, and encourage regional claims on this significant heritage.

This work presents the first detailed study of the construction and materials of the Stockholm Public Library. As the building undergoes a rare period of maintenance and renovation, the floors and walls of the library are examined from three perspectives. First, using available but limited archival documents and plans; second, with non-destructive ground-penetrating radar measurements; and finally, through on-site surveys during local interventions for the maintenance and renovation process. The ensuing results emphasize the complementary nature of this combined research approach in recovering lost or forgotten construction details and further reveal several important findings. In the case of the unique wall finishing of the library’s rotunda, multiple layers of lime mortar, each varying in thickness and coarseness, were used to build up and craft the relief-like interior wall surface. With the use of in-situ aerated concrete and prefabricated Solomite panels in the library’s 1931–32 floor construction, a material connection between Asplund and the broader modern movement in architecture is further highlighted. At first glance, these construction-related findings seem to reinforce the common architectural narrative of the library as a transitional project between neoclassicism and modernism. At the same time, however, the library’s separate periods of construction of 1925–28 and 1931–32 and their distinct materials can be seen as a continuity of construction culture, with the innovative use of local raw materials related to the Swedish landscape.

In 2015, there were around 80 city partnerships between Germany and Ukraine. In addition to the major partnerships between Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig with Kyiv or Berlin and Nuremberg with Kharkiv1, these were mostly partnerships between smaller municipalities with fewer than 50,000 inhabitants. Many of these partnerships were very old and had their basis in the old structures between the Soviet Union and the former Germand Democratic Republic (GDR). Only a few new partnerships were formed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Ukraine’s independence in 1991. Others resulted from the old peace movement in the West, which organized active support after the Chornobyl accident with vacation stays for Ukrainian children in Germany in conjunction with direct humanitarian and medical support.

Marking the anniversary of the redevelopment of the Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam, the related project archive was formally transferred to the Rotterdam City Archive in order to enable proper archival conservation and public accessibility of this essential documentation. This article sheds light on the documentation and redevelopment process of a modern World Heritage (WH) site and on the role of archives as an example for other protected heritage projects or sites.

The destructions of the Russo-Ukrainian war are leading to a rapid loss of cultural heritage in Ukraine, including contemporary 20th century monuments in Kharkiv, the cradle of Ukrainian modernism. At the greatest risk are the sites, which were complex and not well understood heritage before the war - mass housing estates of 1960s-1980s. In view of the postwar reconstruction, there is a great need to analyze mass housing estates in Kharkiv as potential objects of preservation. The purpose of this article is to reveal the architectural and historical value of the first Kharkiv mass housing estates in terms of their innovation, which might be the basis for further preservation steps. The article focuses on the three earliest areas of mass housing estates of the city - Pavlovo Pole, Novi Budynky and Saltovsky mass housing, which were designed and built during the period of the transition to rapid and large-scale pre-fabricated industry in the late 1950s - early 1960s. It is namely during the design and construction of these estates that innovatory technologies and approaches were developed and tested, which were later used in the construction of new housing estates both in Kharkiv and in other cities of Ukraine. These innovations included the system of microdistricts, the staggered system of services for the population, and the method of focusing in urban planning. The creation of a number of standard series of pioneering residential buildings for mass industrial development by the “Kharkovproject” and “Ukrmistostroyproject” design institutes. The study is based on the reconstruction of the historical chronology of design work of 1960’s - 1980’s in the history of Ukrainian city planning; a comparative analysis of the first-erected housing estates, and the definition of the unique solutions of Kharkiv city planners that were implemented in the development of the first housing estates in Kharkiv.

The ideologists of Constructivism and “production art” of the 1920s put forward the slogan “not style, but method!”. However, the Constructivists-“productionists” movement carried a stylistic charge of great power. The intentions of the Constructivists-“productionists”, their manifestos and slogans are polemically pointed evidence of their awareness of their own place in the Soviet culture of the 1920s. Creative practice continued the development of a certain artistic tradition. It is necessary to reconstruct the development of the problem of style in the concept of “productionists” as a natural and historically determined stage of the movement. The manifestation of the rejection of the idea of style in artistic creativity in the concept of “production art” paradoxically corresponds to its specific conditions in setting the task of creating and identifying the mechanism for the development of modern style. They are analyzed in the article.The “anti-stylistic” orientation of “production art” was paradoxically opposed to the orientation towards a “Constructivist style”. In the late 1920s, it covered a wide range of architects and artists who did not belong to the Constructivist movement and who opposed them. In this regard, the fate of several outstanding monuments of the Modern Movement in the architecture of Kharkiv is indicative — the House of State Industry (Gosprom), the House of Projects and the House of Cooperation. They were the largest and most integral ensemble in their architectural and compositional solution, which embodied the ideas of the Modern Movement in Soviet architecture. The reconstruction of the ensemble after the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) showed the contradictions that were embedded in the Constructivist concept of the modern style. The duality of understanding the art form in it was revealed. On the one hand, it acted as an independent stylistic entity. On the other hand, it could also be considered as a framework, a “draft” of some further work with the form. The concept of modern style defended by the “productionists” was problematized by the practice of “Constructivist stylizations”.

The collaborative trans-European dimension of Modernism engenders particularly three huge potentials – especially exploring the developments beyond east and West dichotomies: first, a scope of incredibly rich and diverse modern cultural heritage, second the vital realm and diversity of historic protagonists as well as of current actors, topics, and formats and, third, its fruitful relevance and diverse perspectives for contemporary challenges and opportunities.

This paper explores the composition logic of the creativity of the Avant-garde masters and to identify the principles of the composition language of the architecture of modernism.To characterize the composition language of Avant-garde architecture, systemic, historical-genetic and semiotic methods of research are used. Architectural composition is interpreted as an activity that has its own semantic, morphological and syntactic features. In the example of Svoboda Square (the former Dzerzhinsky Square) in Kharkiv, the logical methods of artistic activity and thinking of the architects of the Soviet Avant-garde of the 1920-1930s are studied.At the beginning of the 20th century avant-garde movements were created artificially, consciously, by an act of will, and they strove to dictate their ideas, concepts and principles as universal and general. The architectural language of the Avant-garde is normative, ascetic and rigidly organized. Distinctive features of the artistic movements of the Avant-garde are the deep analyticity of thinking and the normativity of the declared requirements, abstract concepts and symbols. The logical principles of composition are often repeated thanks to stable semantic associations and are reflected in geometric structures and forms. Thus, the methods of compositional thinking of the Avant-garde form a monological system, i.e. they are internally holistic and normative, not allowing alternatives. It was possible to identify and show that the Avant-garde, as a monological language system, is characterized by the following features: internal integrity, self-sufficiency, normativity; stability of figurative language devices; restriction of freedom of artistic expression with the help of a concept, declaration, slogan, clear conceptual system.Researchers and designers should treat the phenomenon under study not as a “closed”, stylistically defined object, but see it as a complex historical process of structure formation based on an even more complex process of development of thinking and activity of architects and builders of a particular period.