The final event of the public program of the project "After Socialist Modernism", in which we talked about the particularities of the Rosenberg blocks on Podil and presented a website with 3-D models of architectural projects. In the postwar years, this important historical place of Kyiv could be rebuilt on the principle of micro-districts, but in the 1970s and in further development until the late 1980s, the reconstruction of the Podil became much more particular and critical — the approach to this area has changed. The competition in 1979 resulted in a project of Victor Rosenberg's blocks, named after the head of the project team. The team included Natalia Titova, Natalia Rodichkina, Vira Yudina, Oleksiy Tsvyakh and Serhiy Zakharchenko. The project became a breakthrough understanding of the environment in terms of history and urban context. It was a radical break with Modernism while keeping the coherence and long-term planning of the Soviet time.

At the presentation of the project, we talked about how the team of architects managed to rethink their own time of the 1980s, giving urban tenements significantly more profound qualities and why was the project severely criticized, at the time when it itself became a criticism of the usual approaches to residential construction.

The 1980s and 1990s were the period of late Modernism and Postmodernism in the residential construction in Kyiv. During the lecture, we talked about the specifics of the housing estates of Kyiv and the principles of architectural decisions of that time. What is the difference between Teremky, Pivdenna Borshchahivka, partly Obolon and Vynohradar, Vyhurivshchyna-Troieschyna, Poznyaky-Skhidny, Kharkivskiy, Nova Darnytsia — and what similarities we can find? We tried to recognize which principles were the basis of the architectural solutions, how the late Soviet standardized buildings sometimes went beyond the usual standardization and what atypical compositional techniques were present in this mass of houses.

The lecture allowed us to discover the role of supergraphics on facades, the geometry of ornament and change of scale in residential ensembles. We offer to look at how the housing estates of Kyiv were constructed and to understand what non-obvious processes took place in the late Soviet urban planning.

After the end of the ideological control in the late 1980s, there was neither a significant development in the field nor an increase in new editions, translations, magazines, or almanacks. Financial instability, the lack of a tradition of a written discussion, digitization and "extinction" of the text as a medium are the reasons why the development of architectural, urban criticism as well as publishing of the periodicals and books is so hard. How have the forms, approaches and audiences of urban publishing projects changed? Who produces the language about the city and who makes it a part of the public domain — developers, universities or the professional community? How to describe the history of Ukrainian architecture today (without) criticism and access to the archives of publications? What prospects and challenges await the industry — and what response can we form?

In the discussion, we were looking for answers to these questions with the editors of architectural and urban magazines and online platforms in Kyiv.