Tradition and modernity: architecture of the Ukrainian diaspora and Radoslav Zuk (12/28/03)

Tradition and modernity: architecture of the Ukrainian diaspora and Radoslav Zuk

by Walter Daschko

TORONTO - Since 1963, Radoslav Zuk, professor of architecture at McGill University in Montreal, has designed nine very significant and award-winning churches for the Ukrainian diasporas in North America. These projects form the heart of "Radoslav Zuk: 'Tradition and Modernity' - Drawings and Photographs," a much-traveled exhibition that showed at Toronto's Canadian Ukrainian Art Foundation (CUAF) Gallery on November 9-23. The event was sponsored by the foundation and the Canadian Society for Ukrainian Architecture (CSUA).

Prof. Zuk opened the exhibit with a very well attended lecture, titled "Architecture, Environment and Culture," that provided additional insights into his design philosophy in general, as well as the genesis of these remarkable churches, in particular.

Seven of these churches were built in Canada and two in the United States. New interest has been generated by Prof. Zuk's 10th church, currently under construction in Lviv, as well as his proposed addition to the Ukrainian National Museum of Fine Arts in Kyiv. The Nativity of the Mother of God Ukrainian Catholic Church in Lviv formed a remarkably modern backdrop to the temporary papal altar for Pope John Paul II's open-air liturgies in that city last summer. The museum addition, his first major non-ecclesiastic commission, is influenced by, among others, recent de-constructivist trends in international design circles.

While his accomplishments are many, including an influential teaching and writing career, Prof. Zuk's widest impact to date has been, undeniably, his North American churches. These nine churches have enriched not only the individual and collective lives of their congregations but the neighborhoods and cities in which they are situated as well. Perhaps even more significantly, they have also enriched the development of the Ukrainian Canadian and Ukrainian architectural traditions, in which they are unquestionably rooted.

In Canada before the 1950s, the typical Ukrainian Canadian church building was almost always, by necessity, a bit of a hybrid. Unfortunately, it could at times more accurately be called a jumbled, muddled crossbreed. While attempting to remain faithful to the "remembered" models from the varied villages from which the early Ukrainian immigrants came, these early churches had to deal with difficult exigencies. The realities of unfamiliar local construction conventions and techniques, limited financial resources and deep-seated Anglo-Celtic models of ecclesiastic architecture proved to be especially unrelenting.

However, the architects of the post-World War II wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada, and most especially Prof. Zuk, took to this task of hybridization quite willfully and consciously, hoping to transform a necessity into a powerful and complex virtue. In the process the level of discourse was raised exponentially and the respective cultural contexts were better understood and interpreted - both traditional Ukrainian and modern Canadian. The churches illustrated in the exhibition testify to the success of this project, particularly in the hands of Prof. Zuk.

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Prof. Zuk was born in Liubachiv in western Ukraine. He attended high school and studied music in Austria, and after World War II graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a bachelor of architecture degree, as well as several prizes, including the Lieutenant Governor's Bronze Medal, the Dunlop Traveling Scholarship and the highest award in Canada, the Pilkington Traveling Scholarship.

He traveled in Europe and worked in London and Montreal on such projects as the new U.S. Embassy in London and the new City Hall in Ottawa - each in their own way quite influential in the development of architecture in the late modern period. Thereafter, he obtained a master of architecture degree at MIT in Boston. Most recently he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Ukrainian Academy of Art in Kyiv.

Prof. Zuk's skill has also been recognized by the Canadian and international architectural communities. In England, the highly respected journal The Architectural Review commented a few years ago that: "Reinterpreting ancient ritual for contemporary congregations in a way that has meaning is a problem that is both liturgical and architectural ... In Canada ... Radoslav Zuk has built a distinguished series of churches ... He had been concerned to make churches which, while they have particular resonance with Ukrainian culture, do not copy the forms of the past but abstract from them to create places which have an authentic, not kitsch relationship to tradition." Prof. Zuk's work has also been praised in the Italian magazine, Domus, as well as North America's leading architectural journals.

In Canada, Prof. Zuk is winner and co-winner of several competition prizes and is a co-recipient of a Governor General's Medal for Architecture, the highest architectural honor in Canada, for St. Stephen's Byzantine Ukrainian Catholic Church in Calgary, Alberta.

Prof. Zuk's accomplishments are not limited to his beautiful and influential churches. He has taught at the University of Manitoba and the University of Toronto, and is currently a professor of architecture at McGill University and an honorary professor of the Kyiv Technical University of Building and Architecture.

He has acted as guest review critic at the prestigious Architectural Association in London, and Harvard, MIT, Pratt, the Rhode Island School of Design, Yale and other universities in the United States. He has also appeared as a guest lecturer in Europe, the United States and across Canada. He has served on juries of architectural competitions, and has published articles on design theory, cultural aspects of architecture and the relationship between architecture and other arts.

It is in the capacity of architectural theoretician, lecturer and essayist that Prof. Zuk has further influenced the next generation of Ukrainian Canadian and Ukrainian American architects. Through his many talks and insightful conference papers, such as his seminal presentation, "Endurance, Disappearance and Adaptation: Ukrainian Material Culture in Canada" for the 1981 University of Manitoba conference, "Visible Symbols: Cultural Expression Among Canada's Ukrainians," Prof. Zuk continued to define the problems and opportunities around building a Ukrainian diasporan architectural culture.

Walter Daschko is an architect, a former associate professor at the Univesity of Toronto, and an executive member and one of the founders of the Canadian Society for Ukrainian Architecture (established in 1990). He has lectured and written extensively about Ukrainian architecture. For over 20 years, as a professional architect, he has helped design and implement major commissions in Canada and the United States. Mr. Daschko established his own practice in Toronto in 1993.

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