Why I am pursuing Drevograd

The concept began with a climate question: as cities grow, can the places people need be built with less ecological damage and a closer relationship to living systems?

Its appeal is not only technical. I imagine an environment that feels like a park and a small city block at once: leafy and restorative, yet compact, useful and social. I also think the idea is genuinely exciting. That human attraction matters as much as the environmental ambition.

These are intentions, not demonstrated outcomes. I am looking for collaborators who can help test the premise rigorously, identify where it fails and discover what a credible version could become.

In the early 2010s, I was part of the core group that established Yushky, an eco-center in Kyiv Oblast. With donated land, limited funds and many willing hands, it became a practical experiment in ecological building and community life.

The first communal structure was an open summer kitchen: adobe on a timber frame reinforced with twigs, centred on a large stove for cooking and baking. It became the heart of the place. Yushky later grew to include gardens, gathering spaces, art installations and several structures. It received the National ENERGY GLOBE Award Ukraine in 2014.

The project was abandoned after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but its central lesson stayed with me: ambitious places can begin as collective experiments rather than finished answers.

Years later, I wanted my work to contribute more directly to the climate struggle. While exploring household-scale carbon ideas for the XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, I began looking closely at emissions, demographics and the enormous material consequences of urban growth.

During a walk through a forest, a different question emerged. Growing cities will need vast amounts of housing, most of it built with carbon-intensive materials. Treehouses adapt each structure to an individual tree; plantations, by contrast, already offer a repeated geometry. What if architecture could adapt to that living grid?

That question became Drevograd. It is still only a proposal. The next meaningful step is not a polished answer but a collaborative feasibility programme spanning engineering, ecology, human experience and delivery.