Hanna Dorokhina is a lecturer at Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture, where she has been working since 2007. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, she has remained in Ukraine and continued teaching — she didn’t even cancel her online class on the first day of the war. Together with her colleagues, she decided to provide students with at least some stability in a time of chaos. With the outbreak of hostilities, the department’s academic projects were radically rethought: students began designing checkpoints, temporary housing, shelters, and rehabilitation centers.

"We immediately added a shelter to every project. And we suggested that the students design a checkpoint. Now shelters and checkpoints are in almost all our projects," says Hanna Dorokhina.

She recalls how, back in 2022, she developed a design for temporary housing made of six containers, capable of accommodating up to 50 people. The project, complete with materials estimates, was sent to community leaders and shared through the architectural community. Today, students of the department take part in competitions for the reconstruction of Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, and Kharkiv — creating a new environment adapted to the realities of war.