SOVIET HOUSING REDEVELOPMENT Location: Siauliai, Lithuania Edmundas Jankevicius Advisor: Michael McCloskey
Housing large numbers of people with comfort, privacy and affordability remains a challenge for today`s architects, as does the issue of how to build sustainably. Successful housing projects suggest that besides comfort and affordability, social interaction was of crucial importance for a thriving community. Over the past few decades, manufactured housing rapidly decayed and gained a bad reputation because of its plain design, small apartments, relationship to the neighborhood and high maintenance costs, while in some countries manufactured housing was reinvented and successfully implemented. Former soviet block countries changed rapidly over the past two decades and so should their attitude towards communal living and premanufactured housing. To explore these issues I redesigned an existing housing block in a town of Siauliai, Lithuania. My personal experience living in a soviet apartment gives me a unique advantage of exploring personal and communal spaces as well as surrounding landscapes and infrastructure that were inspired by The Garden City movement. Particular importance in the design will be given to thresholds as places of change, and continuity as well as forming a local identity that juxtaposes plain degrading soviet architecture. Other important issues to be explored include: implementation of garden city movement ideas, sustainable building design and the change between open-closed and personal-communal.
In my vision of housing for the 21st century Lithuania, human scale and pedestrian circulation has the priority which dominates throughout the neighborhood connecting housing, schools, transportation and shopping nodes. Building expression through pagan symbols and vernacular building materials will celebrate human integrity with nature which dominated in Baltic culture.