After debuting in New York last summer, the exhibition “Constructing Hope: Ukraine” — spotlighting grassroots organizations helping to rebuild the war-torn country — has opened at the Chicago Architecture Center.

Open through Sept. 1, “Constructing Hope” was curated by architects Sasha Topolnytska and Ashley Bigham and artist Betty Roytburd. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the three mobilized to fundraise for various relief efforts. They closely followed the work of many of the organizations featured in the exhibition, many of which made their designs public domain and readily available — such as MetaLab, a Ukrainian NGO designing easy-to-assemble modular furniture, and First-Aid Spatial Kit, which has developed transportable play structures for children.

“We know the people in most of these organizations personally — they’re our colleagues,” says Roytburd, who is Ukrainian American. “I’ve been wanting to highlight their efforts in various ways, so it’s been very rewarding to be able to tell their story.”

Some of the groups highlighted focus not just on material support but on the importance of storytelling. Prykarpattian Theater, an artist collective, interviews war victims and, based on their memories, builds Thorne-like miniature models of their destroyed homes, mounted in the exhibition on simple, shipping-crate pedestals. Another display discusses how forensic architecture experts were hired to recreate the interior of Mariupol’s Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre just before its bombing in March 2022. Hundreds of civilians had been sheltering inside.

The exhibition also tracks the easy-to-overlook domino effects of the war. Replacing windows, for instance, is now nearly impossible for property owners in Ukraine: Before the war, the country imported 80% of its glass from Russia and Belarus, and most of its glass factories have been destroyed in the conflict. In collaboration with Polish architects, a foundation spotlighted in the exhibit repurposes old windows for reuse, allowing evacuees to return home. The group even published an IKEA-style, open-source catalog to assist with installation.

Broken windows are a recurring motif in “Constructing Hope.” The exhibition’s criss-crossing, sunflower-gold design elements — conceived by Aliona Solomadina, a graphic designer displaced by the war — are inspired by the tape patterns civilians in combat zones have stuck to their windows. In the event of an airstrike, the tape helps keep blown-out shards from scattering completely.

“People started taping the windows in these intricate patterns,” Topolnytska says. “It became an important visual representation of resistance.”

Typically, Architecture Center exhibitions focus on new innovations in materials and design, visionaries in the field, and so on. To president and CEO Eleanor Gorski’s knowledge, “Constructing Hope” is the first exhibition to focus on how architecture responds to wide-scale destruction. Center staff who visited the exhibition in New York were so riveted that the museum moved quickly to bring the same exhibition to Chicago. The exhibition has already inspired the Center to consider future projects related to the wildfires in Los Angeles, which destroyed important exemplars of midcentury architecture.

“I think there are a lot of learnings from the resiliency of the people we see in the Ukraine (sic) and the ingenious way they’re addressing their circumstances,” Gorski says.

A small CAC-specific addition to the exhibition at the back of “Constructing Hope” showcases Chicago-area Ukrainian churches and institutions. Among them is the Ukrainian National Museum, founded in 1952 by displaced scholars. Its new executive director Zachary Dmyterko was the grandson of emigrées who came to Chicago around the same time.

“I had family members who were deported to Siberia; I had family members who were killed by the NKVD, the secret police of the Soviet Union. To stay would have been to die,” Dmyterko says.

The midcentury surge that brought the Ukrainian National Museum’s founders and Dmyterko’s grandparents to Chicago is considered the third of five waves of Ukrainian immigration to the U.S. The first was in the late 19th century, when Chicago’s Ukrainian Village was established. The fifth is still ongoing, as refugees flee the Russia-Ukraine War.

But “even that is uncertain now,” says Dmyterko, who worked as a journalist and at the nonprofit RefugeeOne before coming to the Ukrainian National Museum. The Trump administration has already paused most immigration applications and petitions, and seems poised to revoke the short-term legal stays offered by the Biden administration to migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela as soon as the end of the month. The week “Constructing Hope: Ukraine” opened, President Trump sparred with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a televised meeting and announced he was considering revoking similar privileges for the United States’ estimated 240,000 Ukrainian refugees.

When asked what it was like for the exhibition to open during a low point in U.S.-Ukraine relations, Topolnytska and Roytburd stressed that the war had been raging for more than a decade, long before both Russia’s invasion and the events of the past week.

“We’re resilient to the changes because constantly there has been something new,” Topolnytska says. “The most important thing is telling the story of regular people in Ukraine who are trying to survive the disaster, and who need support. They need international support.”

“Constructing Hope: Ukraine” runs through Sept. 1 at the Chicago Architecture Center, 111 E. Wacker Drive; $15 admission; more information atarchitecture.org