Vul. Chukarina, 1b – residential building

The 15-storied residential buildings of the mass housing district of Sykhiv in Lviv play the part of emphasized insertions among the typical 9-storied housing. The buildings are situated in the main compositional junctions, near public centers. They are the recognizable elements of the local panorama and help people with orientation in the neighbourhood. The building situated on Chukarina street 1b is one of a number of Sykhiv’s accentuated residential buildings constructed under an individual project applied repeatedly. Their construction was started in the mid-1980s. The buildings differed among themselves in the presence or absence of built-in public service functions on the ground floor level. No additional public function was envisaged for the building situated on Chukarina street 1b, and it has remained one of the three building of this typology with no public function added. This can be explained by the fact that it is located at some distance from the active commercial zone of Chervonoi Kalyny boulevard, the residential district’s main axis. Apart from that, the Shuvar retail market is situated close to the building providing both commercial and service functions to a sufficient degree. In other buildings, constructed under similar projects, the residential function was supplemented with manufactured goods shops and groceries, domestic services, cafés, bank branches, surgeries, pharmacies etc.

The building on Chukarina street 1b is blocked with the 10-storied residential building number 1a; the two buildings were designed as a whole. The 16-storied building consists of a basement, fifteen residential floors and the 16^th service one. To form a pyramidal silhouette, the architects reduced the area of floors 14-16. However, the number and layout of the apartments situated on floors 2-13 is invariable (technical archives, Mistoproekt State Institute of Urban Planning, object no. 1850). There are 72 apartments in the building (1-, 2-, 3- and 5-room ones); their total area is 4815 sq. m. while their living area is 2904 sq. m. There are 3 one-room apartments (with living area of 18 sq. m. and total area of 39 sq. m. each) and 13 two-room apartments (with living area of 29 sq. m. and total area of 51 sq. m. each) in the building. The most numerous are three-room apartments: there are 43 of them in the building. These include apartments of three different types; their living area is about 40 sq. m. while total area varies from 55 to 70 sq. m. Also there are 13 five-room apartments there (with living area of 50 sq. m. and total area of 97 sq. m. each). Each floor height is 2.8 m. while its clear height is 2.5 m. Two lifts have been envisaged for the buildings of this type (a passenger one and a freight one). The building area is 542 sq. m. (technical archives, Mistoproekt State Institute of Urban Planning, object no. 1850). According to the construction plan of the building, the load­-bearing walls are inner and outer cross walls (including silhouette stones) on floors 1-7 and outer walls of hollow clay brick decorated with lime-sand stones on floors 8-16. Inner walls on floors 8-16 are made of hollow clay brick. The floors are made of precast reinforced concrete panels; the stairs are made of precast stair flights and landings. Precast reinforced concrete balconies with semicircular ends are a special element of the building (technical archives, Mistoproekt State Institute of Urban Planning, object no. 1850). Some spaces of the building’s façade are decorated in a pneumatic mode with a sprayed plaster base made of polymer-cement slurry. The main vertical axis, which emphasizes the entrance and mirrors the location of the staircase on the façade, is marked with saturated wine red and yellow colours. Vertical stripes, which emphasize the building’s morphology and divide its monolithic volume, are stressed additionally. It was envisaged that the socle would be decorated with beige façade tile. However, the plaster was not renewed, and today the whole building’s façade reflects the lime-sand brickwork. The interior surfaces had to be decorated as follows: the floors in the rooms had to be parqueted, hall floors had to be covered with linoleum, bathroom units were tiled with ceramic tiles, and walls were covered with wet plaster (technical archives, Mistoproekt State Institute of Urban Planning, object no. 1850). Considering the insufficient heat-insulating characteristics of this typological group of buildings, the residents often provide the façades with heat insulation on their own, in a chaotic manner. In spite of the balconies’ configuration, they are glazed by the residents quite actively. Taking into account the change of the ground floor’s function, the transformation of these residential structures and their adaptation to new circumstances can be stated.

Today apartments in the buildings constructed under this individual project applied repeatedly are more in demand than those in the typical 9-storied panel buildings which are most numerous in the residential district of Sykhiv.