Іван Левинський

If you analyze the city’s architecture at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, you will be surprised by how many public and residential buildings were constructed, and often designed, by Levynsky company. Levynsky was a respected philanthropist, an active member of cultural and technical societies, among others, of the Polytechnic School Society, the Society of Workers and Industrialists, and a participant in Ukrainian social life–for instance, an activist for the Prosvita Society.

This research introduces us into the pedagogic activity of Ivan Levynsky at the Polytechnic School. Historical documents from the State Archives of Lviv region helped us to examine and analyze curriculums of the Faculty of Construction (Program szkoły politechnicznéj we Lwowie), including names of academic subjects, number of academic hours for different years of study, and short summaries of the courses taught by the professor Ivan Levynsky.

The diversity of styles of the architectural environment at the outset of the 20 th century gave a unique possibility to express the national identity of a building in its forms and details. The Ukrainian identity was not only present in the buildings of the Lviv but also equally competed with other styles, thanks to the creative methods of interpretation of compositional solutions that were traditional for the Ukrainian architecture and design, implemented by the company of Ivan Levynskyi.

Ivan Levynskyi is an outstanding representative of cultural and scientific life in Halychyna at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. He is one of the representatives of the Lviv Architectural School, which formed a direction, with pronounced tendencies of using folk traditions. Gradually he created a peculiar kind of direction in European architecture – the Ukrainian architectural style.

Attention is paid to the issues of the historical and cultural heritage of prominent figures of the Ukrainian past, its influence on cultural and socio-economic changes, transformational and processes of modernization in Ukraine, and to the formation of a distinctive national socio-cultural space in the modern conditions of Ukrainian state-building, growth of national consciousness and the manifestation of Ukrainian identity.