Ukraine Villages by balbek bureau: rebuilding rural homes that keep regional heritage

Case Study Description:

Ukraine Villages is an online tool from balbek bureau, the award winning architecture and interior design practice in Kyiv, that helps Ukrainians rebuild rural homes destroyed in the war while keeping the architectural character of each region.

The team started with field research, photographing and measuring traditional village houses, then turned recurring patterns into drawings, 3D models and a Grasshopper definition. Published with ShapeDiver, the configurator guides users step by step through layout, facade, roof, colours and decorative elements specific to their region. For the Kyiv region alone it offers more than 200 million unique house configurations, and every design comes with a downloadable PDF set of drawings. The web front end was built with Entire Framework on top of ShapeDiver.

Key Facts

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Business Impact

200M+ house options, Kyiv region alone
Full drawing set for every custom home
Regional heritage kept in each design

Client Name

Location

Completion Year

Project Type

Residential

Tools Used in the Case Study

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ShapeDiver

ShapeDiver turns Grasshopper definitions into secure web apps and 3D configurators that engineers, architects, clients and fabrication partners run in any browser, with no Rhino licence and no access to the underlying script. AEC firms such as Thornton Tomasetti, Ramboll, Haskoning and Walter P Moore use it to share computational design tools across offices, automate drawings and production files, and connect parametric models to their own software through APIs.

Grasshopper

Grasshopper 3D is the visual programming environment included with Rhino for computational and parametric design. Architects, engineers, façade specialists, and fabricators connect components on a canvas to generate geometry, process data, and test design variables without building every option manually. It works directly with Rhino’s modeling environment and can extend into BIM, analysis, optimization, and fabrication workflows through official integrations, scripting, and plugins.

User Experience

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Why this tool/tech was selected

balbek bureau needed to turn a large, data heavy Grasshopper definition into an experience that anyone could use, including people with no design background, and to give every user complete documentation for their own house. Producing these models and drawings by hand for each family was never going to be possible.

ShapeDiver made it possible to run the definition in the cloud, connect it to a custom web interface, and generate a PDF drawing set for each configuration on demand. The team said they had not found any alternative that could do the same. Working with the Human plugin's dynamic geometry pipeline and object attributes, they optimised the definition so that interactive configuration and drawing export run fast enough for a public audience, while the underlying logic stays protected.

Challenges the Client Faced before

Producing house models and drawings by hand for every family was not feasible.
Rebuilding risked replacing regional village architecture with generic houses.
Users had no design experience and needed a simple, guided process.
Generating complete drawing sets from a complex model was initially too slow.

The previous method used

Without the tool, each house would have needed an architect to adapt a typology by hand and produce drawings one family at a time. Early technical versions also struggled with importing Rhino geometry into Grasshopper and with drawing generation, which pushed computing times far too high for a public web tool.

Time / Money saved & the Business Impact.

RE:Ukraine Villages gives families a way to design a home that reflects the traditions of their region and to download the drawings they need to start rebuilding. More than 200 million configurations are available for the Kyiv region alone, so every house can be unique while staying true to local typologies, materials and decorative details.

For balbek bureau, one Grasshopper definition published on ShapeDiver replaces what would otherwise be an impossible volume of manual design and documentation. The approach scales region by region, with the plan to cover the whole of Ukraine, and users have shared how the tool reconnected them with their family homes, with some repainting their houses using the colour palettes from the configurator. The project shows how parametric design and cloud computation can turn expert architectural knowledge into a public service.