Symbols, sites and structure in the architecture of Rimantas Buivydas

ENThe development of architecture in Soviet Lithuania, as you may well know, experienced complex transformations. After WW1I, in the epoch of Stalinism, the Soviet ideology tried to curb its development by establishing a classicist expression. The regime saw this expression as the handiest for the adoption of the Soviet system and the communist ideology through monumental works of art. Over time, the pseudo classicist canon (which was officially referred to as “socialist realism”) was renounced. The Soviet ideologists realized that, in order to “catch up with the West and surpass it”, it was necessary to change the trajectories of artistic ideology and let in the Modern Movement in architecture, which, in the first post-war decades, was considered an expression typically and exclusively of decadent “bourgeois” Western culture. Upon the change in the ideological climate, architectural modernism, from a bitter enemy, turned into a convenient friend. By encouraging architects to undertake new, progressive means of expression, it was aimed at achieving multiple purposes: to make the creators more loyal to the system, to demonstrate to the West that the Soviet Union was not alien to the modern ideology, and, at the same time, with the support from the creators of architecture, to essentially change the townscape of the cities and the cultural scenery of the occupied and colonized states (both the whole of the Baltics and Lithuania). Not surprisingly, as of the 1960s, the Lithuanian architects welcomed the Modern Movement of architecture, delighted in the seemingly more liberal climate of the architectural policy, and wishing to make up for the period when the authorities would ideologically establish what the architecture of the state creating communism was to be. [Extract, p. 141]

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