From the space of open workshops to the space of homely hugs. The story of the architect and urbanist Anna Pashynska

For the eight months of the full-scale war, Anna Pashynska’s team has been building and arranging accommodation for displaced persons. Until February 24, the MetaLab Urban Laboratory, which is run by Anna, organized open workshops for artists. Now, thanks to the laboratory, 200 people have already got a roof over their heads, and another 400 are on the waiting list.

Anna Pashynska told hromadske about the change in the organization’s course, the search for money, and women with spatulas.

Become useful

Comfortable dark clothing and a warm sweater draped over her shoulders. Every detail of Anna Pashynska’s look serves practicality, comfort, and simplicity. It also describes her organization MetaLab, where we meet in the office. Since the beginning of the full-scale war, under Anna’s leadership, a team of architects, designers, and urbanists has been restoring dormitories and municipal buildings for those who have lost their homes.

On February 24, members of the team were flipping through the news feed, feeling extremely useless. A bit later, they started discussing how to help people with housing. So the idea came up to look for large unoccupied premises, such as dormitories, and finish building or restore them.

“I still have videos of Tania and Nazar from our team traveling to dormitories, coming back, and telling us that teachers had already started making repairs there. And that they didn’t have enough money, and we could help,” Anna recalls.

We started with a 2,300-square-meter university dormitory that hadn’t been used in more than five years. In six weeks we renovated 24 rooms and common spaces and provided accommodation for 170 people. At that time, more than 100 volunteers from different cities of Ukraine worked on the project.

“We just bought a couple of spatulas and some paint. For the first two months, every day we were “at the construction site” doing everything ourselves.

Later, when there were already four buildings to renovate, the team became bigger, and the organization could move to the office.

This is how the project to restore three more buildings with an area of 5,600 square meters in Ivano-Frankivsk and Kamianets-Podilsky was launched, which was named Co Haty – “a shared house”. The plan is to put into operation these two facilities by the end of the year.

We experience every crisis as a plus

It was difficult to get the funding after 2014, says Anna. Funds for infrastructure projects were allocated mainly to restore the East. After February 24, when people began to move en masse to the west of Ukraine, it became easier to attract money. However, you need the skills to do this.

“There is actually a whole division that deals only with financing. And not only they need to know English or other languages (which is even better). There are a lot of challenges here. But this is exactly what we knew and could do before the war,” Anna explains.

They started receiving applications for housing financing for displaced persons from the first days of the full-scale invasion but found the financing only five months later. Until then, the organization relied on friends and volunteers.

“We experience every crisis as a plus. When the pandemic started we grew. When the full-scale war began we grew. It seems that all this time we have been preparing for what we are doing now. We learned how to raise funds, practiced working with people, designing and franchising. We are doing what we already know how to do. And only because of this do we succeed.”

Open workshops

MetaLab’s office is located on the territory of the former Promprylad plant in Ivano-Frankivsk. In 2017, the Promprylad.Renovation innovation center — a platform ensuring communication between the civil society sector, government, and business.

We go to one of the buildings where Anna and her team set up an open workshop “Parasolka” (umbrella). This is a kind of maker space for designers, architects, and manufacturers. It can also be called a “gym for craftsmen” — you buy a subscription and work on the machine you need.

“This is a pain point for architects and designers. Because you often want to do something and test it but large production facilities almost never accept an order for one or few samples. And this is a space where you can experiment a lot,” Anna explains.

In this spacious room, there are eight workshops. There are departments of ceramics, textiles, and electronics with machines for processing wood and metal, for plastic recycling. Before the war, they began to hold workshops for children, teach adults how to fix old things, and popularized the ideas of sustainable development and conscious consumption.

During their activity, the “Parasolka” craftsmen restored a table, chairs, armchairs from the Promprylad Assembly Hall, lamps, and a workbench that will be used as an electronics station.

Anna first saw the format of open workshops, where architects and designers created their startups, in Vienna. She studied and worked there. She thought, why not start such a thing in Ukraine?

“One summer I moved just to try to live and work here a bit. I never went back to Vienna. Since then, together with our team, we have been developing workshops and public spaces in Frankivsk”.

Since the beginning of the war, MetaLab craftsmen have been working on creating comfortable personal spaces for displaced people.

“We realized that personal housing is a simple, understandable, utilitarian thing, but it can enable a lot of other processes so people will not travel abroad. For example, a clothing business that employs 30 people moved to our workshops. This means that we need to settle 30 families somewhere. Therefore, it was obvious to us that we need to deal with housing, because there isn’t enough of it. Especially free or at low prices,” this is how Anna explains why when the full-scale war started, the organization decided to engage in infrastructure projects.

According to the plans, the building which is being restored and where the workshop is now located should become an innovative space. There will be trainings, master classes for teenagers, conferences, workshops, and cafes.

 “It will be a kind of Silicon Valley in Frankivsk”.

“We didn’t know it was unrealistic, so we did it”

Then we go “to the construction site” – to the dormitories that are being repaired by Pashynska’s team. Most of the workers here are women. At the entrance, we meet Elia. Anna says that thanks to her “girls have beautiful nails despite working on a construction site”.

Work is in full swing: some change the heating pipes, and others remove the old plaster from the walls with spatulas. Employees show new furniture — practical and comfortable — created by local contractors.

“Our favorite expression is “we didn’t know it was unrealistic, so we did it,” says Anna’s sister, Tetiana.

“Most of the girls from our team know how to work with wood, with various tools, and shape metal. On the first day of the war, these skills allowed us to say: “OK, let’s start”. It happened that I went to the construction site, and no one could even imagine that I could do something with my hands. Especially, when it comes to heavy construction work. And then I would start explaining and showing them how to do something,” Anna adds.

Anna says that not only her laboratory builds walls and repairs ceilings with bricks and cement. It’s about much more — about what you can’t touch with your hands.

“Although we are architects and are engaged in construction, I believe that we are also making cultural changes. This is about participation – a culture of participation, co-creation, and a democratic society in general. And this is our goal – to show the Ukrainians that we can do everything together, enjoy it and do more.”

This partner article was published as an advertisement. The article was created in collaboration with the UN Women project “Decentralization Reforms and Community Security: Transformative Approaches to Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in Ukraine” funded by the Danish government.

Journalist Lesia Pyniak, editors Khrystyna Kotsira and Victoria Beha, designer Tetiana Kostik, creative producer Anna Sokha, and translator Khrystyna Skorenka worked on the piece.