Introduction

2. Klaipeda, Lithuania 2015

In my home country Lithuania, major cities are occupied by countless numbers of identical housing blocks which are also scattered in neighbouring cities too. These housing blocks were created and built by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union) during their occupation of Lithuania from the years 1944 till 1991, these housing blocks were originally built quickly around industrial parts of the city. These apartments were built for the workers to be close to the industrial sites, due to the aftermath of the Second World war, thousands of citizens were without a job or a home. During this period (1950’s) the state owned everything, ultimately meaning people couldn’t own any land or properties and were forced in some cases, to relocate in the country in hopes of finding work (in-migration). There were many similar cases where people were being driven out of the countryside, to major cities all at once, who all needed to be housed. The idea of mass standardised housing became an ideal solution for the Soviet Union, as they could control the cost of production, create more jobs and the larger number of the population was located in one area.

In this dissertation I will be discussing the importance and relevance of the existing remnants of Soviet architecture in Lithuania in the 21st century, specifically focusing on the design of the social housing blocks from their creation to their outlived lifespan. This topic of social housing is relevant due to the complications that the Soviet Union left behind in the design/construction phase which has left unresolved building issues today. Soviet architecture, es-

pecially the concrete housing block’s that have remained in many of the Eastern bloc countries even decades after the collapse of Communism, were originally built to accommodate masses of workers that were brought to major cities and remained as housing blocks to accommodate ordinary citizens later on. I will discuss whether these apartment blocks are worth saving, when they come with the history and memory of the Soviet era as well as the maintenance complications and how they could be potentially saved for future use. These Soviet blocks have arguably become immense national landmarks across Lithuania as well as other Eastern European countries, through their blunt concrete facades, they all are so similar in their appearance, making it very hard to distinguish what cities or countries they stand in when looked at side by side. I will also discuss the architectural identity that the Soviets enforced that took away national architectural individuality of many nations and whether that impacted those who lived in them.

For my methodology I have recorded a series of interviews with friends and family members who grew up and lived in the housing blocks during the 1970’s, to analyse their internal perception against the blunt concrete exterior that outsiders perceive. Looking at Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s work “Last Witnesses”, Alexievich interviewed the children who experienced the Second World war and lived through the aftermath, helping them retell their experiences and traumas of the war in very close attention to empathy and detail. Her work helped me approach the interview process to gather greater depth to what life was like under the Soviet regime. The interview questions were broadened to each person’s individual experiences that differed to oth-

ers, especially how each apartment differed to their neighbours and what made each apartment unique with the life it held within. I also looked at the works of architectural historian Naomi Stead, “Speaking of Buildings” where she addressed many faults in architectural academic writing, where the discipline is lost in the representation of the author ‘the architect being the one who speaks of and for buildings, and for the people in them… Buried deep in the discipline, in its mythologies, is an idea that most people can’t speak about buildings, that they don’t have the legitimacy and the expertise to do that - that is to preserve of architects’ (Stead 2019). Oral history is important in broadening the perceptions to the built environment, including the ‘invisible’ voices that are within that field (Gosseye 2019). The conclusion to ‘Speaking of Buildings’ is mainly a transcription of the conversation between Stead, Gosseye and Van der Plat which unpack the true nature of how architecture is perceived by everyone in society, that oral history needs to be recorded as time is against us and these stories can be lost. Additionally, they highlight the preservation of the voices and that the relationship between the oral and aural needs to work co-dependently. In the interviews I recorded, all of them were translated from Lithuanian and Latvian, in that nature the voice is altered to myself and the reader, however, I tried to use their stories regardless to signify the unheard voices of the Soviet time in Eastern Europe. Due to the translation of the visual and audio, the recorded natural human mannerisms are not translated, the gestures, emotions and pauses are lost in the process. So, I experimented with typography design in my translation of those interviews, into a visual representation of those lost aspects, they are to reflect the qualities of speaking in person.

Time can reveal the truths behind any building, maintenance can become a problem, the architectural style can become ‘out of fashion’, it is important to also (from the architect’s perspective) to take into account the ‘after-life’ of any building and how it will outlive the occupant (Gosseye 2019). Soviet housing blocs have different ‘afterlives’ in different cities, they can be unpacked to three sections: first the influential life it has carried out and have expanded out of Europe to Cuba to Chile (Alonso and Palmarola, 2014). Secondly, citizens have recognised the buildings’ needs to be ‘saved’ and have flourished and been celebrated for its brutalist style (Bednarczyk, 2019) and third, the harsh reality of some Soviet remains to be deteriorating and their future uncertain, left to debate whether they will be saved or demolished (Mikhaylyuk, 2017). With the knowledge that the Soviets designed these buildings to have a lifespan of 20-25 years, raises questions on what to do when they have outlived it nearly double their lifespan, what do they give to their city, is the history and memory preserved, how can we learn from the Soviets’ ideal of standardized mass housing with new technologies?

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CHAPTER ONE: TYPE

3. 1950’s first generation of Khrushchyovka housing blocks.