There are grandmothers. There are Ukrainian grandmothers. And then there is Tamara Kosmina.
The Ukrainian architect and ethnographer is, simply put, a force of nature. Amid decades of fieldwork across her now war-torn nation, she studied traditional folk architecture, with an eye for how ordinary people built their homes and what that revealed about communal life.
You can get a taste of her larger-than-life character and the wealth of her knowledge at Ukraine’s pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale in Italy. The exhibition, entitled “dakh: vernacular hardcore,” reframes the heritage of the roof (dakh in Ukrainian) while unpacking its limitations and potential as a tool of resistance against warmongering Russia. It captures a nation rebuilding in real time and fighting hard to restore a sense of shelter.
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Even as war rages around them, Ukrainians are rebuilding their homes and community buildings. To architects and ethnographers, that reconstruction is a form of resistance against the Russian invasion, too.
And while Ms. Kosmina passed away in 2016, her artificial intelligence doppelgänger stars at the pavilion, sharing valuable lessons and interesting stories culled from her archives and recordings.
The exhibition “takes something as humble yet essential as a roof – a symbol of shelter – and transforms it into a lens through which we see human resilience during wartime,” the digital avatar says in a typed interview, mediated by Ms. Kosmina’s granddaughter, the lead curator of the exhibit, over Zoom. “It’s not just architecture, but an urgent call to action!”
Architecture as resistance
Amid relentless war, Ukraine’s architectural response isn’t the work of boutique firms or governmental blueprints. It’s the fruit of improvised, emergency responses – collaborations between villagers, volunteers, and cultural workers.
The concept of rebuilding and resistance go hand in hand. The “profound dialogue between traditional wisdom and contemporary necessity” is one of the key takeaways of the exhibit, Ms. Kosmina’s avatar tells the Monitor. Her real-life collaborators nod in agreement – some over Zoom, others sitting in a breezy Kyiv apartment filled with art.
“Architecture here isn’t just about static forms; it becomes alive – an act of resistance,” the avatar says. “There are layers – the AI version of myself guiding visitors through decades’ worth of ethnographic research (which still feels surreal!), drone-inspired soundscapes reflecting both protection and fear under attack.”
The digital Ms. Kosmina is the opus of her granddaughter, Bogdana Kosmina. In collaboration with open-source developers, she designed the digital Tamara by drawing on ethnographic archives dating back to the 1960s, cassette recordings, and an independent technology called Iris to mimic her speech patterns and channel her knowledge.
“This process made it possible for people everywhere to interact directly with my accumulated wisdom as if they were meeting me in person during one of those field expeditions across Ukraine,” says the AI Ms. Kosmina.
Bogdana Kosmina, an architect herself, shares how Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine added urgency to the mission of preserving and disseminating the “monumental work” undertaken by her grandmother, mother, and others. They began researching Ukrainian traditional architecture for Moscow-based Institute of Anthropology and Ethnography decades ago. But as institutional desires changed, the resulting watercolors, drawings, and photos piled up in the family home.
Much of the work on show in Venice was previously unpublished. “I just realized all this architecture was without architects – it was all based on natural materials and human skills,” Bogdana Kosmina says of folk Ukrainian architecture. “It is so relevant to our times and our days when lots of [nongovernmental organizations] and self-organized initiatives are using similar approaches … in emergency ways of architecture.”
Rebuilding in a war zone
The centerpiece of Ukraine’s Biennale exhibit, which runs until November in Venice, is a sculptural interpretation of the Ukrainian roof, informed by “The Atlas of Traditional Ukrainian Housing,” a 50-year research effort. Bogdana Kosmina and fellow curators stress that the driving idea was to explore how grassroots, self-built architecture is evolving under the pressures of Russian invasion.
The name of the exhibit, “vernacular hardcore,” makes reference thereto using architectural terms of art: “vernacular” means architecture focused on the functional rather than the formal, and “hardcore” is, per the dakh website, “the assorted bits of debris and clinker that are crunched together to form a building foundation.”
“They cannot use the materials on the ground because the materials are burnt,” Bogdana Kosmina says of Ukrainians rebuilding amid the war. “They are rather shifting from reed and straw to materials such as metal sheets. But they are using the same principles such as self-organization, self-building tools.”
Co-curator Michał Murawski points to community-driven efforts to restore shelter in front-line regions as examples of the “architecture without architecture” carried out by emergency collectives. Volunteer groups such as Kyiv-based Livyj Bereh stepped in to replace missile-shattered roofs, while others like British charity Kharpp focused on windows and doors in remote villages in the Kharkiv region.
The guiding philosophy of such efforts was that the use of local materials and labor would help bolster the local economy and allow communities to process trauma. Since September 2022, Livyj Bereh and Kharpp jointly repaired 900 homes in a cluster of villages in northern Kharkiv.
That changed in March of this year, when Russians started using FPV (first-person view) drones to target civilians and civilian infrastructure, including homes, vehicles, and evacuation routes. In the exhibition, a sound installation mimics the hovering of drones overhead – a daily reality for Ukrainians near the front, and the creative contribution of Clemens Poole, who runs the Drones for Drones project. Mr. Poole compiles drone-inspired music as a way of fundraising for do-it-yourself drone-making projects.
“There are multiple layers of vernacular architecture and vernacular resistance, a type of volunteer, self-organized resistance, that we try to emphasize,” says Mr. Murawski. In all, six elements shape the exhibit, including an opportunity for dialogue with other nations suffering from the scourge of drones – notably Lebanon, which happens to have its pavilion right nearby.
“If someone asked me why visit Venice now – I’d say because it demonstrates how architecture can embrace complexity rather than shy away from crisis-driven challenge,” says the AI Ms. Kosmina. “It reminds us what humans create together amid adversity holds immense power for shaping hopeful futures everywhere – not only within blueprints but also hearts and minds worldwide.”
Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this story.
