Anhelina L. Starkova

The CS Public platform emerges within the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, where infrastructure, knowledge systems, and civic spaces are under continuous physical and cultural pressure. Rather than responding through monumentality or symbolic reconstruction, the project proposes a spatial strategy of resilience embedded in the logic of the underground.
As an architectural research ensemble composed of interconnected subterranean buildings, the project fosters the scientific and IT legacy of the Kharkiv region—an ecosystem repeatedly disrupted yet historically central to Ukraine’s intellectual and technological development. In this sense, the platform is not only a building but a protective framework for knowledge continuity under conditions of uncertainty.
At ground level, the station operates as a civic interface: a digital library, research archive, and public concourse. Its subterranean disposition responds to the contemporary need for spatial security while reinterpreting the underground not as withdrawal, but as an active civic condition shaped by necessity and adaptation.
The core of the system is defined by four horizontal chains of inverted concrete arches, generating both structure and spatial organisation. This repetitive structural logic reflects an architectural ethic of endurance—where stability is not achieved through monumentality, but through distributed, redundant systems capable of absorbing disruption.
Interstitial spaces between the arches accommodate flexible programs—reading rooms, archives, conference halls, and transitional walkways—able to operate independently according to shifting temporal and functional demands. This adaptability reflects a broader condition of urban life in Ukraine today, where infrastructures must remain operative despite interruption, fragmentation, or partial loss.
Public spaces are articulated as inter-arcades, squares, and interior streets that extend beyond conventional urban typologies. Ecological regulation, slow mobility, and ethical cultural practices become spatial principles rather than optional features. At the center, a large interior light space functions as a stabilising void—an architectural “breathing zone” that preserves continuity of perception within a fragmented external reality.
In this way, the CS Public Platform positions architecture as a medium of cultural persistence: not resisting instability through fixed form, but absorbing it through structure, depth, and collective spatial intelligence.