Creation

Creation

Lithuania had been under the soviet regime for half of the 20th century, within that time the Lithuanian people were put through countless forms of oppression from the Soviet Union, from collectivization to in-migration (Lieven 2005). During this period of time, along with the rest of Europe, Lithuania was facing a mass housing crisis, one of the concerning issues that was a result of the Second World War. Lithuania had already been occupied by the Soviet Union, they followed the Soviets implemented solution to the crisis: housing blocks, which in theory worked for many reasons as the regime could put numerous families under one roof into apartments, minimise the spatial elements to a literal minimum and use cheaper methods for construction.

The idea of these housing blocks dates back to when Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the Soviet Union (1920’s), he devised this idea of communal living, where four to five families would share a kitchen, outside area and would have a private living space that was for sleeping. Lenin also planned to ‘expropriate and resettle private apartments’ take away anything privately owned by the general public, and to put the control to the ‘new’ government. Under this proposal, nobody under the regime was allowed to privately own any land or property (Boym 2009). The first form of communal living was tested on existing properties that were previously privately owned, by the richer citizens were taken away from them and turned into said communal living accommodations. Up until Lenin’s death (1924), this idealised new proposal for communal living

inspired many architects to start designing homes of much smaller and denser living space with the communal areas too, of course these were to be temporary housing. However, the idea was slightly amended by Nikita Khrushchev (in 1953) after the death of Lenin and Joseph Stalin, in which he proposed a similar solution for the housing crises; where in which he offered privately owned apartments for a small family that included a bedroom, living room and kitchen for one family rather than Lenin’s government owned option. Khrushchevs reasoning behind his further developed design, was a scheme he had hoped would minimise resistance against the socialist regime.

The first generation of Khrushchyovka (named after Nikita Khrushchev) housing blocks were five stories high, built around the 1950’s till 1960’s, the urban design around these housings encouraged the concept of ‘Garden City’ to be around them. These were the first kind of social housing that ordinary citizens could own; however, it had a process of people being put onto a list and not everyone could be allocated one as quickly, “preference was given to migrants, usually arriving through ‘organised channels’ of migration from the other Soviet Republics and needing apartments immediately upon arrival” (Hess, D. and Tammaru, T, 2019). This caused a higher demand for more housings to be built, which lead to the creation of the second-generation housing blocks (from the. 1960’s till 1970’s) that went up to nine and 12 stories high, with this generation, aspects such as lifts were incorporated, yet, the apartment living spaces were not further modified with each generation. The third-generation housing blocks (1980’s) increased even more, by going up to 16 and 22 stories. With the fast rate of completion, the term “microrayons” was invented to re-

fer to the now new ‘mini-residential-cities’ that occupied main cities such as Vilnius, Kaunas and Klaipeda (Dremaite 2017). The microrayons quickly became very dense with “5,000 and 15,000 people, while the size of housing estate districts varied even more, between 30,000 and 100,000” (Hess and Tammaru 2019) in the Baltic countries, the statistics were much larger in cities such as Moscow. The shift to higher builds, did not incorporate the element of ‘Garden City’ anymore as it became the ‘Concrete City’ due to the political conditions of city planning, rather the construction was set to be further industrialised by reducing the cost yet improving the quality of the builds simultaneously (Hess and Tammaru 2019).