British tabloid calls new Kyiv block a LEGO town

Author

Lesia Solovchuk

The famous British tabloid The Sun posted an illustrative story in the Travel column about the new residential complex Comfort Town in Kyiv that had been built on the site of the former factory Vulcan.

"A Ukrainian city looks like it is made of LEGO, with multi-coloured houses and buildings. Comfort Town in the suburbs of Kyiv was completed in 2019 and is in stark contrast to the other grey Soviet buildings surrounding it," the outlet writes.

In this town, the buildings are painted in bright yellow, green, oranges, and pink colours, including the exterior walls and roofs.

The outlet also mentions that architects Dmytro Vasiliev, Oleksandr Popov and Olga Alfiorova were behind the project designed by the bureau Architecture Digest, and it took 11 years to build up the entire district.

Apart from houses with 8,500 apartments, there are cafes, shops, and offices inside the colorful town, as well as a huge outdoor sports complex.

The idea was to attract people to want to move to the district by transforming 115 acres of what The Sun estimates like about 1.5 times the size of Disneyland into something beautiful.

Following the LA Times, the outlet quotes Dmytro Vasiliev about how the idea with the "colouristics" of the residential complex popped up: "The only instrument we had to work with was colour. We used the simplest materials, the simplest techniques. We really had the colour and lines of the skyline."

Commenting on the story of the Comfort Town's colours, Dmytro Vasiliev, co-founder and partner of the architectural company ARCHIMATIKA, explained to that the new residential complex had been launched in early 2009—right in the midst of the financial crisis.

"As assigned, the houses should be very simple and cheap, so no one knew at what price they would have to be sold. Hence the simple geometry, white metal-plastic and facing plaster. And no balconies, so that the people did not show their creativity when glazing—therefore, only loggias were provided for in the project. From the methods of architectural expressiveness, the architects were left with only silhouette, window, and colour," the architect noted.

Since at the end of the 2000s, the buildings were painted mainly in pastel colors—beige, apricot, and light yellow—this was the favorite gamut of Kyivmiskbud, the new residential complex needed expressiveness, and the colours should be saturated, one of the project actors says.

"But which ones? According to the concept, the roofs and walls were supposed to be of the same colour. The factories produce roofing metal in a very limited color range, usually in simple open colors (red, yellow, orange, blue, and green). The factory could produce custom-made colours, but only in large batches, and it was many times more expensive (and there was a crisis, as we remember.) Therefore, the basis of the colour scheme is the main colours of the manufacturer's factory, and then the colour of the walls was bound to it. Only a couple of colours were custom-made in order to make the scheme lighter or darker as possible here and there," Dmytro Vasiliev explains.

So the colouristics of the Comfort Town is not just a play of colours, but "a story of a combination of an idea, local conditions, and available technologies."