The Norman Foster Foundation has revealed the winners of its international contest to rebuild housing and public spaces in Kharkiv, UkraineOrganised by Buildner in collaboration with Kharkiv City Council, UNECE, Arup, and the Kharkiv Architects Group the competition sought proposals for innovative modular solutions that could be used to retrofit existing concrete panel housing blocks and revitalising public spaces.The Kharkiv Housing Challenge contest launched two years after Norman Foster met the mayor of Kharkiv to discuss reconstruction set out to boost the eastern Ukrainian citys recovery and resilience and will see the winning concepts move from concept to construction.The overall winner was Healing Kharkiv: From Rubble to Renewal, by Andrew James Jackson from Cundall in the UK. The proposal reinforces existing residential buildings using locally sourced concrete and materials from destroyed structures, enhancing security and maintaining integrity.Second place went to Blooming Towards The Sun a proposal offering different interventions based on the level of damage sustained by existing buildings by Zigeng Wang from China. This place was meanwhile awarded to Modus Vita, by Melek Serra Saral, Oleksandr Kinash, Didem Arman and Elif Ilgin from the Yldz Technical University in Turkey.The Russian invasion of Ukraine started more than two years ago on 24 February 2022 and has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties, the displacement of millions of people and the destruction of large areas of the country.The competition attracted 259 high quality entries from 53 countries, including 27 entries from Ukraine. The overall winner will receive a 6,000 top prize and see their further developed into detail designs for future construction across Kharkiv. A second prize of 3,000 and third prize of 1,000 were also awarded.Kharkiv is the second largest city in Ukraine and has been the focus of significant fighting, shelling and missile strikes amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In May 2022, Norman Foster met with Ihor Terekhov, the mayor of Kharkiv and revealed plans to co-ordinate architects in the rebuilding of Kharkiv.The Kharkiv Housing Challenge launched a year after an international ideas contest was held to reconstruct a former high-school in Kharkiv, Ukraine. In February, the Lithuanian government launched an open international contest to rebuild educational infrastructure across Ukraine.Last month, The Norman Foster Foundation launched a second international contest organised by Buildner to reimagine Freedom Square in Kharkiv.The Kharkiv Housing Challenge focused on the creation of a new modular concept which could be used on a range of existing and war-damaged sites to speed up the renewal and reconstruction of Ukraines residential infrastructure with a renewed, yet locally rooted, architectural identity.The contest site was Saltivka a large suburb of the northern fringes of Kharkiv which is home to around 400,000 people and has been heavily damaged as a result of the conflict.Proposals had to offer ways to retrofit existing concrete panel housing blocks and improve public spaces to create safe, energy-efficient, and vibrant neighbourhoods. Along with modular facade and roof components bomb shelters and additional uses in ground floors were also required.Judges included Norman Foster; Ihor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv; Stuart Smith from Arup Berlin; Belinda Tato of Ecosistema Urbano and Harvard GSD; Ammar Azzouz, University of Oxford; and Yurii Spasov from the Kharkivproject Institute, Ukraine.