A group of children crouches on a sandy beach. They shape the soft sand with buckets and shovels, forming a fortress. It is completed with towers, parapets, seashells, defensive walls, and a central castle.
“The immanent logic of fortification reconstructs the built environment with possible futures of war in mind.”1 If fortifications are built from the past for the future, what possible futures do we build as children?
Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the core of our research has revolved around the architecture of defense and sought to reimagine the role and form of fortifications.
Checkpoint
Checkpoint “Protected Lands” (2022) recreated protective constructions that emerged throughout Ukraine following the Russian invasion. A rapid and intuitive response, constructed situationally from whatever materials were close at hand—concrete slabs, metal, timber scraps, sandbags, tires, and soil—transformed communities across the country into an anarchitectural chain. Installed at the entrances and exits of towns, neighborhoods, or residential blocks, checkpoints formed a self-made decentralized defense network aimed at neutralizing Russian subversive reconnaissance groups. Over time, some became part of the landscape itself, overgrown with herbs, moss, and mushrooms, gradually dissolving into their surroundings.
Checkpoint was created without any waste; all materials were brought back to their places of origin after the duration of the exhibition.2 Concrete panels and sand—which came to be inhabited by turtles over the course of the exhibition—were borrowed, deployed, and then returned. This game of assembly and disassembly was not mere logistics, but an enactment of the loop we all are stuck in: a historical recursion of building, dismantling, scattering, and gathering again—a permanent rearrangement of materials, endlessly reconfigured across geographies and scales.
Located in a high-traffic pedestrian area in Tbilisi, Checkpoint was recognizable as a classical form of protection, yet lacking in functional attributes. Brutal, yet integrated into the body of the city. Its horizontal aperture represented both absence and gaze, and created a sense of discomfort, of being tracked, surveilled, hunted, targeted.
One of the most defining features of these impromptu checkpoint structures was their instinctive urge to disappear. If you asked them, they would prefer to meld into the landscape, dissolve into a wild flowerbed scattered by rain and snowmelt, rather than serve as a constant reminder of a potential threat and exist in a preemptive state of disaster.
Checkpoint also evokes August 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, resulting in the separation of two regions—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—and the establishment of Russian military bases there in early 2009. In 2022, the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs reported that over 300,000 Russians entered Georgia between March and July, raising questions about a different kind of occupation.3 Rather than removing themselves from domestic opposition, and in doing so clearing the roads, how does one become an anti-tank obstacle?
Zmiievi Valy
According to legend, a huge Serpent attacked the inhabitants and ate them. So two heroes caught the Serpent and, harnessing it to a plow, forced it to plow the land. From that furrow a rampart was formed, which was later called the Serpent's rampart. The Serpent himself crawled exhausted to the river and, after drinking water, burst.4
Unlike the reactive and sometimes chaotic network of checkpoints that emerged following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Serpent’s Wall (Zmiievi Valy) is a vast system of earthen fortifications first built during the reign of Prince Volodymyr Sviatoslavych of Kyiv in the tenth century. In this ambitious infrastructural project, wood and soil structures rise up to four meters as both an act of defense and a means of developing and claiming territory. Starting in 1974, Ukrainian archaeologist Mykhailo Kuchera led extensive research on the Zmiiv Ramparts (1974–88) and later Trajan's Ramparts (1988–90), playing a crucial role in both cataloging and advancing archaeological fieldwork.
An archaeological reconstruction formed part of the Ukrainian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Ramparts were built from wood and earth, symbolically extending Ukraine’s historical defensive line westward to Venice. In the open air at the Giardini, the earthen Valy became a quiet hangout area, raising the question: what sustains the vitality of such a space, a wall, a barbed wire, or a country fortifying against the advancing war?
Many children ran through and on top of the structure, excitedly tugging at clumps of grass together with their roots and the soil. Gardeners constantly tended the lawn-covered hills. Over time, they slowly grew into wild and natural slopes, in parts even hosting tomato plants. As the surface mutated, so did the way people interacted with it. Compared to the sterile and controlled precision of lawns, wildness here pushed people away, sowed distrust.
If the agrarian cultivation of land is the rule, the rampart is an exception. Zmiievi Valy is a story of how something artificial grows and takes on new functions. It is part of a belligerent landscape constructed to protect human settlements. However, Zmiievi Valy has shifted over time from serving human needs to becoming an obstacle for them. At the same time, it has come to provide protection for nonhuman residents, specifically steppe vegetation like hairy feather grass (Stipa capillata), comb rye (Agropyron pectinatum), Valaisian fescue or tippy fescue (Festuca valesiaca), furrow fescue (Festuca rupicola), and comb fescue (Koeleria cristata).
The beach waves are promising collapse, but for now, the world holds its breath, watching hopecore videos. What is the best way to protect your castle?
Derek S. Denman, “On Fortification: Military Architecture, Geometric Power, and Defensive Design,” Security Dialogue 51, nos. 2–3 (2019): 5.
“Checkpoint ‘Protected Lands’,” Tbilisi Architecture Biennial 2022, ➝.
Muraz Safoev, “Uncontrolled Immigration to Georgia Resulted From the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Perspectives of Idrak Mirzalizade,” Caucasus Watch, August 21, 2022, ➝.
Oleksii Petrov and Kateryna Ulianova eds., Before the Future (Kyiv: ist pubishing, 2024).
