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MISLEADING MEMORIES Words Ieva Davulyte
Image references ISSUU Bnieuws
Nietzsche (1876) states: “I believe, indeed, that we are all suffering from a consuming fever of history and ought at least to recognize that we are suffering from it”. In the case of Lithuania, the years 1944-1991 consisted of a period of destructive occupation; the Church was suppressed, the intelligentsia was harassed and obstructed and massive deportations were carried out to eliminate any resistance to collectivization or support of partisans. However, the evolution of thought still continued and so did the evolution of the built environment. The question is: what symbolic values should be considered while reimagining the architecture of occupation?
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The role of intangibles in architecture Architecture plays a communicative role by expressing its symbolic values through choices in colours, sizes, materials, and forms. In order to explore the role of symbolic qualities in architecture, it is essential to first define what these roles can be and how they act. For example in public institutions, such as banks, values of trust, reliability, and security are expressed through the use of grandiose spaces and marble, which provide a feeling that this institution is going to last. This is also evident in the case of schools, hospitals, and so on and so forth. However, the communicative effects of buildings can also be manipulative and, accordingly, they do not always express their true meaning. Therefore, designers tend to manipulate the symbolic values for their own purposes. This is especially relevant when talking about architecture in the Stalinist era. Architecture, that was made to symbolise the superlative, incomparable and absolute totality which consequently had evolved into the supressed individual freedom. As Shah and Kesan (2007) mention, there are three potential ways in which architecture can regulate: architecture may be
partial and treat certain social values less or more favourably; architecture plays a communicative role by declaring symbolic or cultural meanings; and architecture can affect people’s interaction. It becomes clear as a result, that in the context of authoritarianism, architecture can gain a malicious intent. Re-imagining architecture of occupation from harmful memory For historical continuation to not become a reason for preserving all Soviet buildings, analysis of aesthetic development of thought has to be done. Looking at the Soviet periodization in Lithuania through the architectural prism, there appear three major aesthetic tendencies (Petrulis, 2006): social realism, industrial Soviet modernism, and diverse manifestations of stylistic searches. Let’s begin with social realist architecture which is associated with the period of Stalinism (1945-1956). The profound feature of the social realist architecture is the belief that through the use of classical compositional elements an architecture can be filled with a political undercurrent. In figure 1, we
