The act of caring is an integral part of architecture, the primary function of which is to provide protection. In the context of Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine, everything has become vulnerable. To ensure that the magnitude of this challenge is met with a rapid and dignified response, we need a new coordinate system, with new agents of change. How does the war change the role of architects? What methods and motives do we have for care in architecture? How can care in architecture become our new normal? How can we find beauty in spaces of care? Care has its own beauty. It means recognizing the challenge, taking the responsibility and daring to take action. Stories of emerging ideas, actions and decisions perform diverse ways of creating spaces of care. This serves to remind us of the fundamental purpose of architecture, and the extension of what an architect's role should be in a society—even without war. care collective aims to create conditions where stories about care can be heard. To achieve this goal in the context of Before the Future, care collective has issued an open invitation and is actively disseminating information about the opportunity to join the collective with stories and projects that the initiative hopes to bring to public attention.

The project is co-funded by the European Union

In their book Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet [1], curators Elke Krasny and Angelika Fitz argue that the current state of the planet — the climate crisis and various forms of social and spatial exclusion — is a consequence of a lack of care. But the pressure to optimize and capitalize time and resources does not take into account the externalities that are now fatal to us. Referring to the political philosopher Joan Tronto, the authors define care as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our 'world' so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web” [2]. The notion of this “life-affirming network” also reflects the original notion of architecture as a shelter that no longer confronts nature but is an interconnected environment for living; a habitat for life that combines local and planetary aspects.

Every society shows care according to its standards of living and its understanding of “the best,” says Joan Tronto [3], a professor of women's and political studies. In order to assess whether care is conducted good or bad, it is necessary to pay attention to the standard of "good life" and the standard of care. Then this question becomes very political. What we care about determines what kind of society we are.

J. Tronto also identified five aspects of caring that help explain the nature of this phenomenon: caring about, caring for, care giving, care receiving, and caring with.

Caring about means that we are attentive to the needs that need to be met. Before the process of caring can begin, the need for care must be recognized.

Caring for is the phase of caring that deals with accepting and sharing responsibility. Once someone has noticed a need for care, they must take responsibility for it.

Care giving requires attention to the acts of care themselves. For example, if a building is intended to serve as a shelter, how does it do so? How are materials and workers selected, transported, and used? Are workers protected and cared for during the construction process?

Care receiving. What happens next when care is completed? Because care processes are ongoing, everyone involved is affected and transformed in some way during the process. How well have the needs that started the change been met?

Caring with. Caregiving in all its forms creates a safe environment. When care needs are reliably met, over time, people may feel grateful to those around them who provide this ongoing care. In such cases, it becomes a way to strengthen solidarity and trust between people. Over time, caring can become the norm in society.

In the Beauty of Care project, stories are revealed through different aspects of the phenomenon of care and are told through a metaphorical reproduction of the processes that unite them and the symbolic objects that appear in individual projects.

"...reconfiguration of practices at a moment of emergency connects us to the more material spatial sense of what surrounds us and becomes the basis of information. At the moment of the event, people are acutely aware of the importance of their physical position and the interdependencies with their immediate surroundings that make up the urban structure. Spaces cease to be mere positions, to become concrete places enmeshed with the decision-making and action of that precise moment.

It should be noted here that at the time of armed conflicts, everything that becomes external information is highly uncertain both for the inaccuracy of the sources and for the excessive information provided. As events are ongoing, the temporary nature of information, which overlaps with personal experiences, also contributes to uncertainty and "knowledge fragility". This fragility intensifies the relationship between people and places, as a vulnerability that connects us, shared experiences that provoke a pronounced feeling of merging oneself with the sense of place, a contradiction between physical distance and virtual presence. This relationship marks different degrees of identification situated in physical places based on precise spatial practices related to protocols of action."