Sacrificial Public Facade

At the UN’s Second Forum of Mayors (2022), the Mayor of Kharkiv, Ukraine, called for a new masterplan to address war-damaged housing. In response, the Norman Foster Foundation launched an open call for strategies for Saltivka, a neighborhood of over 400,000 residents near the Russian border. The brief required modular solutions to retrofit concrete prefabricated housing, repair facades, enhance public space, and integrate civil protection such as bomb shelters. Our proposal introduced a “sacrificial facade” that doubles as a building-wide bomb shelter during conflict. Conceived as an extension of public space, it also provides vertical connections for community interaction and functions as a shading device. Using architectural grafting techniques, we developed retrofit strategies supported by construction process diagrams, physics-based blast simulations, and community life scenarios. Adaptable and scalable, the system offers a replicable model for retrofitting clusters of residential buildings in conflict-prone urban contexts.