“In Finland we really felt architecture”, the Lithuanian architect Vytautas Čekanauskas used to say when remembering his study trips to Finland in the 1960s. Indeed, there were two sources of inspiration for Soviet Lithuanian architects. The first was the pre-war modernist architecture of Kaunas, a living memory of the independent Lithuanian state. The other one was the Nordic regionalism, which became very important in the formation of the Baltic post-war modernism (1959–1969). It was seen as an acceptable model for the Baltic architects who wished to belong to the international community of modern architecture, while retaining the national idiom and being distinctive within the USSR. In this context, the architecture of the Soviet Lithuania was regarded as exceptional, such, which appropriated western cultural models much quicker and with greater passion, and this was one of the reasons why the country was labelled ‘the Soviet West’ or ‘an interior abroad’. It is the formation of built environment in modern Lithuania and its Nordic connections that will be discussed in the talk.
Marija Drėmaitė is a Professor at Vilnius University, Faculty of History. She holds a PhD in History of Architecture (2006). Her research is focused on twentieth-century architecture, modernism, and industrial heritage. Her publications include Baltic Modernism: Architecture and Housing in Soviet Lithuania (Dom publishers, 2017) and the edited Architecture of Optimism: The Kaunas Phenomenon, 1918– 1940 (Lapas, 2018) which accompanies an eponymous exhibition.