As political turmoil in Ukraine continues to make international headlines, a University of Oregon project in the country has passed a major milestone.

Four years of transnational efforts by UO Portland architecture students contributed to the opening of the first two buildings in a new campus for Ukrainian Catholic University near the historic center of Lviv in western Ukraine. Gerald Gast, an associate professor of architecture at the UO, worked with graduate students from the Urban Projects Workshop of the Department of Architecture in Portland to develop the master plan for UCU’s new Stryiskiyi Park campus.

“Ukrainian Catholic University is significant because it is the first Catholic university on the territory of the former Soviet Union,” Gast says. “It stands as a free, independent model of university education in Ukraine. The new campus site was dedicated by the late Pope John Paul II in 2002 when he visited Lviv. The university has a strong base of financial support from around the world.”

Gast and the UO graduate students designed their campus plan to have a formal and unified order, but not a rigid symmetry. “At the same time, its spaces and buildings engage the city, communicating the presence and importance of the university mission to the outside world,” the master plan says.

The current political and economic turmoil in Kiev, located approximately 300 miles from Lviv, has not directly affected the UO work with UCU. But a 28-year-old UCU history professor, Bohdan Solchanyk, was killed by a sniper on a visit to Kiev in late February. 

“Now we in Ukraine have much work to do,” said UCU Vice Rector (provost) Taras Dobko. “We must not miss this chance to turn Ukraine into a normal country. It will be difficult. But I see hope in the fact that now many people share the slogan of [the] Solidarity movement in Poland:  ‘Nothing about us without us.’"

More information on the UO's connection to the Lviv campus is available on the School of Architecture and Allied Arts website.expanded story is here.

- from the UO Office of Public Affairs Communications