New details are emerging on Norman Foster’s proposed master plan for the besieged Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. 

Popular German outlet DW has some information on the plan, which Foster and Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov have yet to make publicly available following an initial announcement in April.

For now, the plan reportedly entails at least five “pilot projects” and an interior overhaul of the city’s destroyed House of Regional Administration building that is similar to the firm’s reconstruction of the Reichstag by leaving only its existing facade remaining over a modernized interior. 

Among the pilot projects, a new science and technology center will be enacted in addition to an unspecified “architectural landmark” at the city’s center and new 6-kilometer (3.72-mile) pedestrian park at the confluence of the city’s Kharkiv and Nemyshlya rivers. Further “Industry” and “Housing” pilots will involve the adaptive reuse of surviving residential buildings and a coal-fired power plant, providing the clean energy and “high-tech architecture” needed to remake Kharkiv into a “city of the future” as Foster outlined in his April manifesto.

In a blog post published on his Foundation’s website, Foster claimed to have called “weekly working sessions” with the ten-member Kharkiv Group of Architects; solicited a “public participation questionnaire” that garnered more than 16,000 residents’ responses; and held over 100 discussions with local and international stakeholders, all of which align with the manifesto’s demand for Ukraine to be rebuilt by and for the fiscal benefit of Ukrainian design firms. 

Ukraine is facing staggering costs of rebuilding the country after a now ten-month war that has left potentially hundreds of thousands dead and accumulated a minimum of $127 billion in damage to the country’s infrastructure and built environment. Foster’s ambit has been dogged throughout by critics who say his involvement is “completely inappropriate” and abnormal in the context of other major post-war rebuilding efforts, including the Marshall Plan. What should follow (assuming the war ends soon) can thus be taken as a case study to be applied to the rest of the country's major urban centers. 

More details on Foster's inclusion of local architects can be found here.