VALDAS OZARINSKAS: ARCHITECTURE BY OTHER MEANS ANNA KATS
states enthusiastically sought independence from the Russian-led yoke — the early 1990s brought an optimism for the future of an independent Lithuania much as they witnessed the collapse of the only state system Ozarinskas had theretofore known. Some of the sense of rupture pervasive in this transitional period would remain in Ozarinskas’ work for the duration of his career. In 1988, Ozarinskas submits a degree project to graduate from the Lithuanian Academy of Art that encapsulates something of the ethos of uncertainty: a house assembled of fragmented, disjointed planes so jagged that the depicted building cannot be inhabited. Buckling planes and warped shapes intentionally violate a quaint, traditional notion of home. Ozarinskas’ design betrays what Philip Johnson described as the “pleasures of unease” in press quotes for the “Deconstructivist Architecture” exhibition, which he co-organised at the Museum of Modern Art, New York that same year. And indeed, Ozarinskas’ work shares some of the affinity for early-Soviet Constructivism, the viciously rough dismantling of archi-
Valdas Ozarinskas with an architectural model for his diploma project, 1986
Valdas Ozarinskas became a dissident architect somewhat by accident — as much for his character and ideas as for the circumstances of his career. Ozarinskas entered architecture at a moment of political instability, in the late 1980s as the Soviet Union collapsed. The Baltic
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tectural orthodoxy, and the skewed geometries of that exhibition’s protagonists, among them early Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Like the Deconstructivists, Ozarinskas understood irregular geometry as a structural condition, not just a dynamic formal aesthetic, and proposed in turn an architecture of disruption and dislocation. Yet unlike his more famous fellow travellers, Ozarinskas never developed a portfolio of built work, never calcified into a signature style, and never traded a sense of unease for a sense of self-satisfaction borne of the scale and sheer spectacle of their work. The more the Deconstructivists
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Lithuanian pavilion at the EXPO exhibition in Hannover (with Private Ideology), 2000
