The legacy of Lithuanian urban and semi-urban vernacular architecture and possibilities of its preservation

Abstract

Interest in vernacular architecture and vernacular buildings has grown significantly during recent decades. Nevertheless, despite the number of important studies that have been proliferating, there is a lot of material in various geographic localities that still requires further scrutiny. Vernacular architecture in the post-Soviet/post-communist space is one such area. In the Lithuanian context, vernacular buildings have been long neglected and marginalized in research projects, even though traditional Lithuanian architecture (previously often referred to as “folk architecture”) has been quite well-researched and remains an object of interest. There are, however, certain particular forms of contemporary vernacular architecture—urban and suburban in particular—that have rarely been scrutinized for numerous reasons. The former suburb of Šnipiškės, now being converted into a new center of the city of Vilnius, is an area where modern housing and office towers co-exist with older vernacular buildings. Having been constructed in different historical periods and socio-cultural contexts, they represent the features of local vernacular architecture as well as certain relations to rural vernacular architecture. As an urban quarter, Šnipiškės is comparable to the kampungs (or urban villages) that exist in Indonesia and some other countries. The peculiarities of vernacular buildings in Šnipiškės are discussed in this article. The other type of vernacular discussed is the suburban “collective garden” house, largely constructed during the Soviet period when city-dwellers were allowed to maintain small pieces of land for individual semi-urban farming and erect simple structures on their sites. After the fall of the regime, this type of house underwent numerous changes: some of them, designed with the help of architectural professionals, were eventually reshaped and reconstructed by their owners according to the “Do it yourself” principle. Both types represent a culture of contemporary urban and semi-urban vernacular architecture. As cities in the eastern part of Europe, including Lithuania, are undergoing rapid and often heedless transformations, understanding the value of vernacular buildings and preserving some legacy of surviving vernacular structures of various types is culturally important.