WOMEN, EDUCATION, AND AGRICULTURE: REBUILDING UKRAINE

with Allison McBrearty, Shuai Liu, and Nicolas Schlegel

The educational modules serve to keep education accessible in times of conflict, residential modules provide housing for families or for students who find themselves alone, and the agricultural modules will be a source of skills learning and economic growth for Ukrainian women. They will be able to cultivate traditional agricultural techniques in the greenhouses and learn new technological skills as well as grow food in the vertical farms. Women will be able to establish economic independence for themselves, their families, and their communities by participating in ownership of the vertical farms. The education, independence, and empowerment women gain will contribute in immeasurable ways to the rebuilding of Ukraine.

Ukraine is known as the breadbasket of Europe, and the reason for this is due to its high concentration of chernozem “black earth” soil which has 10% more organic matter than other soils, contributing to higher fertility. Almost half of all of Ukrainian exports are agricultural, but these exports were diminished by half since the start of the Russian invasion. The decrease has millions more worldwise suffering from food insecurity, the global numbers are more than double what they were in 2019. In response to the global food insecurity that the war in Ukraine has fuelled, the United Nations sponsered the Black Sea Grain Initiative which put three out of thirteen ports back in operation with specific routes to be protected. However, this initiative has been only partially successful because low income, devolping countries receive the least amount of grain putting already vulnerable communities even more at risk.

Our studio’s goal was to create a modular educational platform that could be ordered and shipped wherever it was needed. Understanding the variables that respond to different users’ and sites’ needs was a critical component in designing for the organization and connection of the modules on site. To the left is a visual representation of two Grasshopper scripts, constructed by our resident Grasshopper expert, Shuai Liu. The idea is that users’ would input their needs based on the number of people they expect to serve and information about the site for the script to then run a series of operations that results in many different iterations of the modules organization and orientation on site. These can be weighted to prioritize either daylighting or privacy, two parameters that we identified as having a critical importance towards shaping the modules’ organization. The data generated from the first script is then exported to an excel sheet and imported back into a second script that lets the user visualize the different iterations and filter by prioritizing sunlight hours, privacy, grouping, or density. It is then up to them to decide on a final iteration and the corresponding modules to be shipped out to meet them.