Building Blocks for Disaster Relief

New York Times

08-05-2025

At the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, an installation constructed from scaffolding stitched together with nets and tube-shaped railings wraps the French Pavilion at the Giardini della Biennale and winds its way down to the water's edge.
It's not a structure meant to dazzle. Instead, it embodies something more pressing: a manifesto for architecture's role in addressing what the curators Brendan MacFarlane and Dominique Jakob call a 'polycrisis' — the overlapping emergencies of climate change, war, displacement, economic instability and systemic inequality.
This theme, summed up by the title 'Vivre Avec/Living With,' sets the tone for a pavilion at the biennale dedicated to casting an extremely wide net for expertise and employing fast, not-so-precious solutions to an ever-expanding cascade of issues.
'We're not making things as individuals anymore,' Mr. MacFarlane said in a video interview. 'We're working as collectives, linking capacities, sharing intelligences.'
The pavilion itself reflects the scrappy nature of this strategy. 'It's not a house, not a building,' he said. 'It's a kind of skeleton. It adapts to the landscape and leaves no trace.'
The pavilion showcases no fewer than 50 projects from around the planet. Some deal with climate adaptation, others with disaster relief. But none embodies the spirit of cross-cultural collaboration and intrepid architectural repair quite like Speedstac, a modular concrete building system developed by the Toronto-based architect Zenon Radewych, who is a principal at the firm, WZMH.
Originally conceived as a fast, scalable solution for Canada's concrete-loving real estate sector, Speedstac has found relevance in war-torn Ukraine. As Russian bombs and artillery devastated the country's housing stock, Mr. Radewych saw an opportunity to rebuild in partnership with Ukrainians.
Speedtac's Lego-like modules — constructed both vertically and horizontally with bolted connections — are crane-lifted concrete boxes, some outfitted with mechanical systems, kitchens and cladding.
'We created a 5-inch chase between stacked modules,' Mr. Radewych said in a video interview, 'so all your ductwork, wiring and sprinklers go in cleanly. No bulkheads. No clutter. It's architectural simplicity born from necessity.'
That innovation was already underway when, in early 2022, Russia launched its invasion. Mr. Radewych, whose family is Ukrainian and who grew up speaking the language at home, was flooded with job applications from refugee architects. Rather than relegating the first of these hires, Yuliia Fedorenko, to menial tasks, he brought her into the firm's research and development lab, known as Sparkbird. She helped the team tailor Speedstac to wounded Ukrainian cities.
'What began as helping one person find work became a mission to help a generation of Ukrainians reclaim agency through architecture,' Mr. Radewych said. In addition to employing Ukrainians both in Canada and, remotely, in their homeland, his firm reached out, through workshops, competitions and internships to a network of the country's architects, engineers, students and academics. University partners alone included the Kharkiv State Academy of Design and Arts, the Donbas National Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture, the Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture and the Kharkiv School of Architecture.
In the months that followed, members of this informal community imagined new ways to use Speedstac: from reconfigurable housing for veterans with disabilities to modular kindergartens with built-in bomb shelters to mobile field hospitals.
'You could see their excitement,' Mr. Radewych said. 'They weren't just working — they were building something that could one day rebuild their communities.'
Perhaps most compelling, WZMH and its Ukrainian cohort reimagined Speedstac as a way to repair bombed Soviet-era towers — typically, concrete buildings designed to be particularly robust. In some cases they proposed slicing off damaged segments and inserting Speedstac units in their place; in others they considered stacking new modules atop or next to existing buildings.
'These concrete towers in Kharkiv and Kyiv — they're not that old,' Mr. Radewych said. 'People are still living in them. They've literally saved lives. We asked: How do we not erase, but reinforce? Not demolish, but heal?'
His contacts in Ukraine have advised him to wait until the war ends to try to realize such ideas, which he plans to do mainly in an advisory role. 'I think the architects rebuilding Ukraine should be Ukrainian,' he said. 'There's a lot of amazing talent. I think what they simply need is support.'
Speedstac's narrative of resilience deeply impressed the French Pavilion curators. 'Speedstac went right to the heart of what we were trying to do,' Mr. MacFarlane said. 'It wasn't about abandoning. It was about repairing. One is aware of what's happened, but one is repairing with life.'
He and Ms. Jakob, the founders of the Paris-based architecture studio Jakob + MacFarlane, are known for adaptive reuse. In 2012, they finished the transformation of old docks along the Seine into the City of Fashion and Design building. Rather than find a new exhibition building in Venice this year, they modified the existing pavilion. They, too, hired Ukrainian architects after the war broke out.
'People, when they're hurt, often don't want to move,' Ms. Jakob reflected. 'They want to stay where they are.' That sentiment mirrored Mr. Radewych's design logic: to let residents remain rooted, even amid trauma, and to build on the foundations of what was already there.
Ryan E. Smith, the director of the School of Architecture at the University of Arizona and a founding partner of MOD X, a prefab construction advisory group, noted that Speedstac's use of concrete isn't ideal if one considers the carbon emissions associated with the material's production. Neither would it be as effective as lighter weight solutions in places where speed is paramount. But Speedstac, he said, could be a good fit in Ukraine (and other vulnerable places) because of its robustness and the region's familiarity with the technology.
The WZMH team, in partnership with Toronto Metropolitan University, is developing a concrete that's 20 percent lighter than is standard, embeds captured carbon as one of its ingredients and even exhibits conductive properties that could one day power smart infrastructure. Collaborating with Ukrainian software engineers, it has created a real-time installation app called Doton that tracks crane movements and improves construction precision. 'One invention leads to three or four others,' Mr. Radewych said.
Back in Venice, the pavilion's culturally diverse participants were addressing other worldwide problems, such as ongoing initiatives to relocate flood-prone Bangladeshi villages uphill and repurposing and expanding 1960s modular homes in Canada to meet contemporary needs. As Mr. MacFarlane noted, 'These are global issues. But if we look around the world, surely we can find ways of dealing with the same problems in different ways. Those differences are amazing to watch.'
Humility characterizes both the pavilion and Speedstac — an acknowledgment that in this challenging moment, the modernist dreams and universal solutions of singular 'great thinkers' no longer apply. Instead, what emerges is an imperfect, collective architecture of negotiation.
'Maybe we don't need to restore everything,' Mr. MacFarlane suggested. 'Maybe we become custodians. Maybe we pull back, and let architecture respond — not impose.'