Alex Fisher - Exclamatory Commonality in Contemporary Ukrainian Development

Fisher 1 Exclamatory Commonality in Contemporary Ukrainian Development Each city is a construction. Each city is in construction.

Some cities have blueprints. Some cities have no blueprint. Some cities peek at another city’s blueprint, and then avert their eyes the moment that other city begins to suspect their plan is being peeked at. Some cities can’t stop staring, forgetting that they have their own city to run and shouldn’t waste the whole work day admiring another city. Some cities don’t know where to look. Some cities only look at themselves. Some cities fixate on pictures of themselves when they were younger and the wrinkles on their face had yet to pronounce themselves.

Most cities do a combination of the above. Ukraine’s cities are no exception. Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, and company are cycling through approaches at pace. In the process, commonality is being channeled, costumed, and contracted.

The character of commonality in Ukrainian cities is exclamatory, enunciating itself in the titles of business towers, clubhouses, cafes, and living complexes. This propulsion towards incantation inspires this paper, which encounters ego and expanse in the projects of two property development firms and a supporting cast of consequential ventures.

My city as your house; your house as my city I moved to Ukraine in September 2019 after completing my university studies in Philadelphia. The phenomenon this paper engages hit home a few days after my arrival in Kyiv. Walking towards the city center from my new office at Mystetskyi Arsenal, I passed the illuminated sign for SAGA Development’s PHILADELPHIA Concept House. It was already dark, so the early-stage construction of the sixty-fiveunit residential building was lost in shadow; the backlit metal ‘PHILADELPHIA’ appeared to be lording over a lot all its own. Strikingly, the sign was affixed to a tall, gapless fence. Philadelphia was proximate, but impenetrable.

Fisher 2 The novelty of meeting the city where I had just finished living for four years in a city located thousands of miles away was not lost on me.1 That said, it was surprising to encounter a luxury address named after Philadelphia. Despite its status as the site of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Philadelphia does not exactly have a refined reputation. To the contrary, Philadelphia is known for being rough and rebellious. The city’s hockey team, the Flyers, is nicknamed the ‘Broad Street Bullies’ for their physical, fight-prone style of play. The city has suffered more than its share of mob-affiliated crime and corruption.

In a discussion about voter fraud broadcast on primetime television, Donald Trump said “bad things happen in Philadelphia,” an allegation which has since been emblazoned on t-shirts, sweatshirts, and stickers by proud Philadelphians (Catalini and Levy).

In short, Philadelphia is like any place—imperfect. SAGA Development conceives it as sleek, state-ofthe-art, and shining.2 They give a similar five-star treatment to five other American cities (Chicago, Boston, Washington, New York, San Francisco) and Britain’s Bristol.

Not every city in the SAGA portfolio is a Concept House. The CHICAGO Central House is in the commercial heart of Kyiv—a fitting title recognizing that Chicago is SAGA’s only Midwestern city.

SAGA’s SAN FRANCISCO and BOSTON Creative Houses are in Kyiv’s periphery. The firm’s conflation of San Francisco with creativity is not a stretch; the city has long-since earned a reputation for its commitment to free expression and expectation-defying entrepreneurship. The ‘creative’ association comes less easily to Boston, which stereotypically skews towards establishment stances.

SAGA uses ‘central’, ‘concept’, and ‘creative’ to stratify. Each of their Concept and Central developments cater to the ‘business+’ class. Their Creative Houses target a ‘comfort’ customer. The tethering of the creative label to the less financially affluent can rub the wrong way, but it isn’t exactly unexpected. Less expected is the linking of creativity and comfort. Silicon Valley was made on the motto “move fast and break things.” SAGA sells a more risk-averse creativity.

As presented, SAGA Development’s treatment of its collected cities appears uninvolved in that the personalities of the cities are not prioritized. Nevertheless, the firm’s evocation of the city as a house is strong. Following this evocation, the city fills with belongings, memories, friends, and family. The city is the inside from the outside. Simultaneously, the city itself comes home. The Metropolitan Museum falls asleep on the sofa. The National Mall takes a hot bath. The bike lanes duel the bus lanes for the last pint of ice cream in the freezer. The Golden Gate Bridge irons its red suit in the walk-in closet before another day on the job.3 Consuming the frontier SAGA Development tiptoes into the complexities of commonality. The proprietors of Alaska Restaurant dive in headfirst.

Alaska is the ice-clad crown of America, famous for gold, salmon, sled dog racing, the formidable bush, a biting cold, and a seemingly endless wild. To survive there you must have grit, courage, discipline, and an urge for the isolation that comes with expanse. Convenience is not your convention. Rugged is your regular.

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In Kyiv, Alaska is a restaurant serving “sophisticated Mediterranean cuisine with Italian motifs, king crabs and the freshest seafood” whose “menu is the result of our work and your experiences” (Alaska).

The front patio has hookah and the main entrance is flanked by felted polar bears. Awaiting guests inside the enterprise’s entrance is a wooden whale, whose flipped fluke conveys its enthusiasm and anticipation for another night of largesse.

Alaska’s clients accentuate the restaurant’s elaborate course of commonality, particularly through the cars they park on the public sidewalk. On a Tuesday afternoon in July, the frontier state’s big cat population made their presence felt via a pink BMW with custom ‘MEOW’ license plates. On a Saturday night in October, Alaska’s notoriously inhospitable climate was recalled in a Range Rover with midnight rims and a navy paint job covered in lighting bolts.

To be sure, seeing commonality in ostentatious shows of wealth is selective seeing—a seeing that turns a blind eye to brutal inequalities in the Ukrainian socioeconomic system. Clemens Poole, an artist from New York based in Kyiv, reminded me of when he and I saw two Alaska staff members, older women in maid uniforms, cleaning the thousands of small white stones the polar bears are positioned amongst. They were doing so one by one with washcloths. Their task speaks to the lengths taken by Alaska to project an immaculate image, an image so absorptive it allows Alaska’s customers to totally immerse in a storm of their own status, and ignore the assault on the less well-heeled pedestrian’s psyche when access to Alaska’s wide open expanse is obstructed by an aggressive congestion of luxury vehicles.

The case of Alaska obliges the question: when an instance of commonality draws attention to inequality, does the conciliatory component of commonality lose its cause?

Politics as (un)usual The circumstances surrounding the becoming and coming to of a cadre of cities and states in Ukrainian cities is informed by the contained condition of those cities and states. Cities are in states. In the United States, states meet to make a country. In other words, cities and states are constituent parts. What happens when you construct the whole? A comprehensive answer has been provided by the Lviv-based RIEL Real Estate Corporation.

Fisher 4 RIEL’s portfolio includes some fifty properties. These properties primarily take the form of ‘living complexes’—multi-building developments populated with playgrounds and shops. They are often located in semi-suburban districts. Two of these living complexes are named for countries—Америка (America) and Велика Британія (Great Britain). One is named Шенген (Schengen).

Living Complex America’s marketing has a red and blue palette that refutes partisanship. The top banner of the living complex’s website embraces the spectrum of shades between those two poles, privileging purples. The same spectrum saturates the living complex’s tag line: “the territory of your capabilities.”

This tag line signals that RIEL’s America intends to instill a sense of opportunity. The discourse for RIEL’s Great Britain differs, endeavoring instead to tap into a refined lineage by offering “quality and comfort for all time.” According to the firm, “the owner of an apartment in Great Britain will emphasize the aristocracy of his soul and commitment to respectability.”4 RIEL’s America and Great Britain are pleasantly pious. RIEL’s Schengen is auspicious.

Ukraine’s ongoing journey to joining the Schengen Area has been full of detours, and traffic jams. For those that are bored with waiting, RIEL has fast-tracked the process, allowing buyers to purchase their “own personal Europe” in the form of a one, two, or three room flat in their near-complete white, black, and yellow living complex.

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The relationship RIEL cultivates between Europe and Schengen is compelling. Europe is a continent. The Schengen Area is a mobility zone. Europe is an entity and Schengen is a passport-driven way of existing in part of that entity. RIEL flips the rules and roles, making Schengen the superstructure while extending the right to participate in its promise of enhanced interconnection.

The logo for RIEL’s Schengen encapsulates the initiative’s intricacies. It is orange and has three vertical prongs rendered so as to seem three-dimensional. The middle prong rises above its peers. Together, the prongs form the arms of a stylized ‘Ш’, a Cyrillic letter that phonetically sounds like ‘sh’. In doing so, RIEL punctuates its Schengen with a letter from the alphabet adopted by its native language, an alphabet which is not used by any of the official languages spoken in the twenty-six member states of the Schengen Area. Continuing the interpretation in the preceding paragraph, the symbol likewise appears as a sideways ‘E’, signaling Europe’s reorientation. Venturing beyond typography, the tiered format of the prongs suggests the Tризуб (Trident), the national coat of arms of Ukraine, which dates to the days of Vladimir the Great, who ruled Kievan Rus, a broad territory which included parts of present-day Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—which are now members of the Schengen Area.

Finally, the logo is an op-emojified castle; Schengen is no Khrushchyovka.5 Elementary appeal. Or elementary apparition?

Incanted commonality in Ukrainian cities is not restricted to appropriated place. People are called upon as well. In addition to those named after America, Great Britain, and Schengen, RIEL Real Estate Corporation operates living complexes named Шерлок Холмс (Sherlock Holmes) and Доктор Ватсон (Doctor Watson).

RIEL’s Sherlock Holmes is a twenty-nine-unit apartment building in Lviv less than five minutes walking from the city’s famed Old Town. The slogan for the living complex, which, as of mid-October, is reported to be ninety-five percent sold, is “hundreds of stories can be written in this house, one of which is yours!”

This pitch posits living as authoring; RIEL’s Sherlock Holmes invites inscription. What’s more, RIEL takes care to resolve the question of whether the story being authored is a work of fact or fiction, noting that “one in five people in the UK believes that Sherlock Holmes was a real person. Lviv residents can confirm that he not only exists, but also looks great.”

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RIEL asserts Holmes’ appeal in property form, and insinuates his taste for rooftop terraces. The developers do not dwell on the idiosyncrasies of his personality and the dangers of his profession. Holmes brought an excitable skepticism and idiosyncratic pipe-smoking charm to every case he took on. The private detective’s methods of serving justice, and even his vision of justice, rarely hewed to official standards; his means of manifesting what the majority would likely deem a moral motive often put him in personal peril. A setting subject to serious, serial peril is perhaps not the most pleasant setting in which to set down roots. Alas, residents of RIEL’s Sherlock Holmes can rest with the conviction that the public will thank them when the case closes.

Sherlock Holmes is the hero; Doctor Watson is his steadfast sidekick who refuses the spotlight’s temptations. The erudite doctor doubles as Holmes’ narrator. RIEL’s Doctor Watson is reported to be sixty-eight percent sold and is billed as a “real friend […] who is time-tested, remains faithful over the years, and is ready at any moment to lend a hand.” The forty-two apartment building is a peer, a trusted confidante, and a “gentleman who loves comfort and rationality, but does not forget about elegance and sophistication” (RIEL Real Estate Corporation). In Doctor Watson’s manner, the living complex is its residents’ companion, keeping them in check and diligently cataloging their endeavors with their best interest in mind.

RIEL’s Doctor Watson raises different ways of perceiving a resident’s relationship with the personified living complex.6 It follows that the most obvious ways are: 1) by buying into a person, the resident partners with that person and 2) by buying into a person, the resident becomes part of that person. When the question of “what do we have in common?” is then asked, these options indicate that the answer could be “you and I are we” or “I am you.” Neither answer is neutral, but the former is more latent than the latter.

Both Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are role models who readers look aspiringly upon. You don’t have to read between the lines to realize the aspirational motive of naming a living complex after them.

The top-level titular intent for these two living complexes and the rest of those discussed in this paper is obvious, and extraverted—as evidenced by the bombardment of emails and pop-up advertisements I receive for these properties after browsing their websites without turning off tracking. I know who these properties are; these properties know who I am. The push-and-pull then comes from who purports to know the other better.

Canvas to complex RIEL does not restrict their personification to literary protagonists. They also establish a link between art and architecture with a subset of properties named Моне (Monet), Ренуар (Renoir), and Енді Ворхол (Andy Warhol). SAGA Development in partnership with Perfect Group, Citex Development, and Terra Project joins this pantheon with the KANDINSKY Odessa Residence. These four artists are markers of movements. Monet and Renoir for Impressionism. Kandinsky for Abstract art. Andy Warhol for Pop art, and, well, much of what has happened since. The line where each artist ends and his artworks begin is decidedly blurred. The line fades further as the decades since their deaths continue to accumulate.

Whereas Living Complex Sherlock Holmes and Living Complex Doctor Watson lean on the disposition of Holmes and Watson, Living Complex Renoir and Living Complex Monet focus on their namesakes’ vision, tapping into the notion that it is easier to recognize ‘a Renoir’ or ‘a Monet’ than ‘the Renoir’ or ‘the Monet’. RIEL says its Renoir “is maintained in the classical spirit, and impressionistic landscapes open from its windows.” They continue, noting that “the color scheme of the facade elements resembles the “mother-of-pearl” period of the artist.” Described as such, those who live in Renoir the living complex live in a Renoir canvas that stretches beyond the living complex.7 The living complex may fill the

Fisher 7 foreground, but the background is bountiful and unbounded. Background and foreground feed into one another even more explicitly in Living Complex Monet; RIEL “created the house as an organic continuation of the landscape.”

Compared to the fluid Living Complex Renoir and Living Complex Monet, Living Complex Andy Warhol is flat. Significance is concentrated on the living complex’s surface. The ends of RIEL’s Andy Warhol are covered in multi-story butterflies that recall his screen printing process. The logo of the living complex is also a butterfly. I find this selection unsatisfying; butterflies are all but absent in the artist’s prolific output. If I were RIEL, I would have chosen Marilyn Monroe (the glamour), a Campbell’s soup can (you are what you eat), Elvis Presley (a hunk, a hunk of burning love), or the electric chair (Death and Disaster lurk around every corner). However, I am not RIEL, and if I were RIEL, RIEL would probably be bankrupt, or at least passed out on the bathroom floor—in need of resuscitation and restructuring.

Butterfly aside, whoever prepared the copy for RIEL is responsible for writing a one-sentence summary of Warhol so incisive and ironclad that it should be in Art History textbooks: “In a sea of bold original ideas, Andy Warhol always found a place for pragmatism.” This unnamed author also wades into an identity war, asserting Warhol as “our famous eccentric countryman.” While Warhol’s family did have ancestral roots in the region where his living complex now sits, there is a dearth of evidence linking him directly to Ukraine. His parents, Julia and Ondrej Warhola, emigrated to the United States from Miková, a farming village in northeastern Slovakia. Julia and Ondrej were Rusyns, an East Slavic people speaking the Rusyn language and living in a cross-border Carpathian territory encompassing swathes of modern Slovakia, Poland, and Ukraine. Warhol himself refuted unilateral affiliation to one origin story, saying “I’d prefer to remain a mystery. I never like to give my background and, anyway, I make it all up different every time I’m asked” (Goldsmith 87).

The “countryman” commonality claim is problematic, and reductionist. Luckily, the living complex’s nomenclature provides a reprieve from this proxy nationalism. The acronym for житловий комплекс (living complex) is ‘ЖК’ (LC), and RIEL’s Житловий Комплекс Енді Ворхол (Living Complex Andy Warhol) is often abbreviated as ‘ЖК Енді Ворхол’ (LC Andy Warhol). This description achieves Warholian incorporation, making the move from individual to enterprise.

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Andy Warhol never stepped foot on Ukrainian soil; Wassily Kandinsky spent a foundational portion of his youth in Odessa, a Ukrainian city on the Black Sea which was then part of the Russian Empire. So the KANDINSKY Odessa Residence has precedent. The project is sprawling, comprising four twenty-two story ‘monolithic wireframe […] houses’ subdivided into 978 apartments. Marble and blonde wood abound. Kandinsky’s arcs, fissures, and jagged lines are projected and etched into the lobbies, yet the ‘spiritual concerns’ of art which occupied Kandinsky’s attention receive scant coverage.

The slickness of the KANDINSKY Odessa Residence consumes the soul of a Kandinsky composition.

But what if Kandinsky’s soul took up residence in KANDINSKY? Would the life lived within fill with abstract fragments? Synesthetic sensations? The Kyiv-based interdisciplinary artist Alina Yakubenko tapped this potential when she posted a picture of the residence on her Facebook feed and attached the satirical comment “I almost started filling out an application.” Of course the KANDINSKY Odessa Residence could be an an artistic residency.

Commonality couples with convoluted clarity in the KANDINSKY Odessa Residence. Kandinsky’s masterworks of ‘pure abstraction’ are illustriously inscrutable. Kandinsky as an apartment for the affluent in Odessa is clear, justified by the artist’s personal history. A figurehead for pushing past the familiar has been made familiar, collected rather than collectivized.

Enlightenment in control It is said that you are only as good as the company you keep. The company in contemporary Ukrainian construction is prestigious, but there is no routine procedure for privatizing people and places occupying prominent positions in the global public consciousness. This propensity to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time by attending to a subject’s traits and talents with varying degrees of allegiance extends to SAGA Development’s treatment of the thinker behind the world’s most famous equation, Albert Einstein.

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SAGA’s ten-story, twenty-seven flat EINSTEIN Concept House in Kyiv is fifteen minutes walking from the Universytet metro station. Tech is intrinsic to the project. The house incorporates “smart home” and “smart apartment” technologies, and the landing page on the project website quotes a speech Einstein delivered to students at the California Institute of Technology in 1931: “Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors.” The eminent thinker’s genius has been transferred to remote controls; he who wrote enlightened formulas is remembered in a home offering a formulaic style of living.

Einstein is synonymous with the upper echelons of academia. Stanford University enjoys a stellar reputation for academic excellence too, and is in the midst of being developed by Perfect Group into Living Complex Stanford. The development is forty-five minutes walking from the EINSTEIN Concept House. Though it is too early to tell whether this development will live up to the perfection alleged in the developer’s name (the project is scheduled to be completed in the third quarter of 2022), its adaptations are already apparent. Cardinal red is the calling card for Stanford University. Living Complex Stanford has elected to use orange and black. Stanford University is lauded as one of the leading future-facing institutes of higher education, conferring degrees in fields ranging from Aeronautics and Astronautics to Ethics in Society. Living Complex Stanford calls itself a “business classic.”

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Simply put, thinkers like Einstein who work at universities like Stanford produce knowledge. That knowledge is their intellectual property. To incentivize its production, intellectual property is usually protected—through patents, trademarks, copyrights, etc. This protection process, which has fluctuating effectivity, is equivalent to a system of checks-and-balances. EINSTEIN Concept House and Living Complex Stanford are attempting to be intellectual properties. Critics have claimed that the brains behind each property, SAGA Development and Perfect Group, have cut corners, principally that each firm’s executives have not complied with municipal zoning regulations and have exploited their political connections in expediting the permitting process (BINUS). These allegations are credible and can’t be ignored. They affirm the susceptibility of title subjects to speculative exploitation as in the situation of the Tragedy of the Commons, greed exhausting to the brink of extinction a resource which could have endured and effloresced in a setting defined by precaution and solidarity.

What is fair is fickle, and flexible. To reference Einstein, fairness is relative.

There is no title authority Titles tell the truth. Titles lie. Titles can be a signature or a pseudonym. Titles change. The titles included in this paper are for items which have been heavily promoted and can be possessed, predominantly apartments. These projects target the upwardly mobile or the established elite (not necessarily the ‘commoner’). They represent an infinitesimal proportion of the ventures which could be discussed in the framework of an enquiry into the circumstances of titular commonality in contemporary Ukraine. Another paper, for example, could be written about the course of commonality in kiosks, like the Maryland coffee window selling Americanos to passengers waiting for the tram in Kyiv’s Podil district. Poetry and poetic justice could be concentrated on, soaring to fresh heights at Living Complex LookYanSky near Kyiv’s Lukianivska metro station and coaxing out the cheekiness of the living complex located on the former site of the legendary nightclub Plivka being called White Lines. Place and people could be separated. More space could then be made to hypothesize how to map a network of constructed states, countries, and continents, or contemplate whether constructed people have been monumentalized, mummified, immortalized, or reborn.

Despite many being unfinished, none of the projects this paper covers are Potemkin villages. Their commonality is not ‘in name only’. Their commonality is intuitive and versatile, imparting that a common name can conjure an uncommon existence in conceiving a standalone construction of steel, glass, and concrete as a city, canvas, or confidante. Constructed in Ukraine, a country itself in construction, this uncommon existence is ultimately a coexistence—with neighbors of all shapes, sizes, statures, and spirits.

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Footnotes 1. This serendipity was reinforced when I purchased a pack of printer paper from Pencilvania, a stationery store in Kyiv whose name riffs on Pennsylvania, the state in which Philadelphia is located.

2. The only nod to the city’s imperfections comes in the form of an absent ‘E’. The property’s sign is missing a vowel; ‘PHILADELPHIA’ has been anonymously edited into ‘PHILAD_LPHIA’.

3. SAGA’s name fuels fantastical interpretations. Dramatic and everlasting, sagas lift legends and the legendary, endorsing potential instead of essentializing.

4. What if you buy a property in both Living Complex America and Living Complex Great Britain? Do you get a double dose of country credentials? How would that change if America was merely an investment—something to park your assets in and sublet—and Great Britain was your actual address?

5. Khrushchyovka are repetitive, urgently-built concrete apartment blocks nicknamed for Nikita Khrushchev, the Communist Party First Secretary who commissioned their construction.

6. ‘Living complex’ is a loaded term, and it is hard to ignore the temptation to flip the order of its two parts. Life is complex; ‘complex living’ is calling it like it is, isn’t it?

7. Square footage is not an adequate metric for the footprint of a Renoir flat.

Bibliography • “Як фаворитам Банкової роздають дозволи на найнезаконніші забудови (Bankova’s favorites are given permits for the most illegal buildings.” YouTube, uploaded by BIHUS info, 30 March 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZUxomOuBnY&fbclid=IwAR3YsKHxaDMQ901WeqHNkay2O oNE-Kgyj8cYTAriICqYjKZ9zwqe6S2EuFo. • Catalini, Mike and Marc Levy. “For Trump, city where ‘bad things happen’ looms large.” Associated Press, 17 October 2020.

• Goldsmith, Kenneth. I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews. New York, Carroll & Graf, 2004.

• “Home.” Alaska Kyiv, 19 October 2020, https://alaskakyiv.com/en/.

• “Home.” Living Complex America, 19 October 2020, https://www.america.lviv.ua/.

• “Home.” Einstein Concept House, 19 October 2020, https://einstein.house.

• “Home.” KANDINSKY Odessa Residence, 19 October 2020, https://kandinsky-residence.com.ua.

• “Home.” Living Complex Schengen, 19 October 2020, https://shengen.com.ua/ • “Objects.” RIEL Real Estate Corporation, 19 October 2020, https://riel.ua/objects/.

• “Projects.” SAGA Development, 19 October 2020, https://saga-development.com.ua/en/projects.

• “Projects - Living Complex Stanford.” Perfect Group, 19 October 2020, https://perfectgroup.ua/ru/projects/zhk-stanford/.