This summer, around 100 architecture students and young professionals from Europe (and beyond) will come to Slavutych, Northern Ukraine, to participate in SESAM 2021 — Poliklinika. After postponing the event for a year due to the global pandemic, and putting in place a series of Covid-compliant measures to ensure the safety of everyone involved, the event will take place over three separate cycles with a reduced number of participants.
The dates for the new cycles are:
2–10 August 2021 / 12–20 August 2021 / 22–30 August 2021.
Each cycle will consist of six WORKSHOPS, run by architectural students and young professionals under the umbrella theme ‘Poliklinika’ (polyclinic in English), focusing on healthcare and its relation to architecture. The workshops cover a wide spectrum of practices in architecture, from design and construction to theoretic research and conceptual art.
The location for SESAM 2021 Poliklinika is the city of SLAVUTYCH, a city built to rehouse the workers of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (CNPP) and their families, after being evacuated from Prypiat, following the explosion of the fourth reactor in 1986 — the worst nuclear catastrophe in history. The new city would not only provide dwellings to those who had been evicted from Prypiat, but also to heal them from the trauma they had experienced.
As opposed to Prypiat, built to represent the quintessential ‘atomic town’, a nuclear energy centred city with a strong focus on industrialization, building technology, and densification, Slavutych was planned as an exemplary human-centered town nestled in the middle of the woods.
The town was built in just 18 months through the collaboration of eight Soviet republics, each of which was responsible for erecting a district that then bore the name of its capital: Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Leningrad, Moscow, Tbilisi, Baku, Yerevan, Kyiv. Architects, masons, engineers, and designers from each of the republics came to build their respective districts, often with clear references to their own ‘vernacular’ styles. Prefabricated concrete panels, wall paper, and window frames were also imported. It resulted in a beautiful mixture of different late-modernist styles, human scales, pedestrian friendly avenues, and the first cycling paths in the USSR.
The theme for this year's SESAM, POLIKLINIKA, is focusing on healthcare, and its relation to architecture at the physical, methodological, and metaphorical levels. The theme aims to question the methods used in architectural practice to diagnose and prognose a ‘problem’. We propose three anatomic planes through which healthcare — maintenance or improvement of health — will be addressed during Poliklinika through workshops and other discursive exchanges: prophylaxis, diagnosis and therapy.
SESAM 2021 Poliklinika is a part of Slavutych — Small Ukrainian Capital of Culture 2021 and is supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation.
Supported by
Media partners
EASA Ukraine NGO
01033 Kyiv, Ukraine
easaukraine[at]gmail.com
EASA Ukraine is a non-profit independent organization that promotes informal peer-to-peer education in the field of architecture and urban planning and is a national chamber of the global community of the European Architectural Student Assembly. EASA Ukraine was registered as an NGO in 2019 to organize the first major event — SESAM 2021 Poliklinika.