Modesty and Open-Endedness: Towards an Architecture of Democracy

After 52 years of dutifully standing still, with eyes turned confidently to communism’s bright future, the statue of Vladimir Lenin was taken down from its pedestal in Lukiškės Square in Vilnius, the capital city of former Soviet Lithuania, on August 23, 1991. As a crane lifted it up, the statue broke in half; with the crowd cheering, the upper two­thirds of Lenin swung in the air, while the legs, suddenly depleted of the grandiosity provided by the body, remained oddly attached to the pedestal.

It was by far not a rare occurrence that year. As the Soviet Union was slowly but steadily collapsing, hundreds of monuments dedicated to Lenin, Marx and Engels, Soviet soldiers, and industrial proletarians fell in Poland, Hungary, Estonia and other countries formerly under communist rule. With the totalitarian regime gone, the people behind the Iron Curtain could finally imagine a future for their polities based on the ideals of democracy, the rule of law, and general inclusivity. That future eventually came — for some countries earlier, for some later: a large part of the former Eastern bloc joined the EU in 2004 and are now imperfect, yet functioning, democracies. But as time went on, one thing did not change: throughout the last thirty years, the space freed up by the fallen Lenin in Lukiškės Square has remained distinctively empty.

It was not that it looked good that way. Quite the contrary — the landscape architecture of the square was designed with a statue at its centre in mind. With Lenin and the pedestal gone, the emptiness of the large rectangle of gravel was disturbingly obvious. It was also not that the square was irrelevant or that people did not care. Located in one of the capital’s central areas, the square and the question of a replacement monument were a topic of public debate for most of the post­independence period.

The problem was that finding agreement on Lenin’s replacement turned out to be very difficult. The case of Lukiškės Square is not an isolated one. After more than half a century of their existence, the communist governments left the territories of the Eastern bloc littered with millions of statues, parade squares, museums of “communism and revolutionary history,” grand administrative buildings, and imposing “palaces of the people.”

This project of incredible scale and commitment was hardly unique in its aims, namely to project and assert political ideals through architecture and urban design. It stood out, however, in the sheer distance between what was being projected and the real­life experience of the people. While the Soviet Union is often cited as an example of a wrong­headed economic project, it was also its politics that was a source of the inconsistencies between image and reality: its officially celebrated but meaningless elections, the prevalence of censorship and all­reaching security agencies, and palaces of the people that never saw collective deliberation happening inside of them. At its core, the communist architecture was meant to project the idea that it was the unanimity of the people — and not the efforts of a handful of re volutionaries or, later, nomenklatura in Moscow — that initiated, supported, and sustained the kind of societal organization that characterized former Soviet countries. Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth. Lukiškės Square here again acts as a miniature illustration of history: a grim building across the street from the Lenin statue housed the central offices of the KBG and NKVD, two main security agencies which were responsible for controlling the popular dissent from the regime, and where thousands were interrogated, tortured, and killed during the fifty years of the occupation. As a typical “parade of the people” dedicated to the 1917 October Revolution would march through that street, the discrepancy between the ideals projected and the reality experienced would appear at its finest. To the left of the crowd stood the statue of Lenin representing a unanimously decided direction towards the socialist tomorrow; to the right — the palace of the KGB and a painful reminder that that direction was neither chosen, nor supported by the people in question. just a choice between replacing Lenin with a similar statue of a national hero or converting the square into a public park. It is the question of how to project a political ideal of democracy through architecture, without fixing it into perpetual conflict with reality.

Democracy: for open-endedness, against conceptual closure

To locate the solution to this problem, it is best to start by unpacking the ideal in question. To project the ideal of democracy through architecture is to project a particular value­weighting: namely the one which places primary weight on the ability of citizens of the political community to act collectively in the name of the whole. For the people formerly behind the Iron Curtain, this emphasis is based on their shared struggle under totalitarian rule and the wish to pursue a future for their polity based on goals which are deliberated collectively, not derived from class theory or the laws of history.

It is evident, then, why the question of Lenin’s replacement (and the fate of all remaining communist political architecture) has been so difficult. Having experienced the excessive divergence between what is projected and what is real through the half­century of Soviet rule, the people in the Baltics, Hungary, or Poland have faced a troubling tension between the wish to project ideals of democracy, popular sovereignty, and independence, and the knowledge that such attempts are prone to going absurdly wrong. In other words, the question reflected by the empty gravel rectangle in Lukiškės Square is more than

Deliberation and reflection, as Laurence Whitehead aptly notes, are crucial in conceptualizing democracy as an ideal. Democracy is about social consensus — but nonetheless, a consensus that is always interrogated, deliberated, and rechecked in the individual consciousnesses of the citizens. Because of its reflexive and deliberative nature, democracy as an ideal, in Whitehead’s words, ‘precludes the conceptual closure concerning its own identity.’ All worthwhile conceptions of democracy have to incorporate a cognitive capacity to challenge fixed orthodoxies. As an ideal, democracy calls for essential open­endedness.

This is a big problem when it comes to projecting the ideal of democracy through architecture. The choice to fix the projection of an ideal in stone seems to run at odds with that ideal being open­ended. In other words, the activity of putting an ideal into plans and designs is precisely the case of conceptual closure regarding the identity of that ideal. The architecture of the Capitol Building in Washington, for example, might aim at projecting the ideals associated with American democracy, but whatever it projects is fixed by the decisions of the architects of the late 1800s. A fresco in the building’s rotunda, for instance, depicts the apotheosis of George Washington. Some of the ideals it embodies — the compatibility of democracy with slavery or idolization of the great men of history — have long been rooted out of the social consensus by critical collective reflection. The fresco, however, cannot, without being completely redone, reflect these changes. Deliberation may well happen inside the Capitol building concerning various questions, but the ideal projected through its architecture is conceptually closed.

In the same way, replacing Lenin’s statue with another grand statue would mean projecting ideals which were important at the time of the building but closing down the way for incorporating reflection and deliberation into that projection.

The solution to this problem comes from how a similar conundrum is solved in urban planning. In his book Building and Dwelling, sociologist and urbanist Richard Sennet sets out the tension between two concepts: ville, the built environment which planners can influence and which is fixed once the plans are made, and cité, the human life that is led in that environment which, being uncertain, is beyond the deterministic influence of plans and designs. To focus entirely on planning the ville would mean ignoring the many ways humans unexpectedly alter their built environment and committing the mistake of a top­down planned city. On the other hand, to trust only cité — that is, to leave everything for bottom­up human behaviour and to abandon urban planning altogether — would also not be feasible.

Sennett’s solution lies in the concept of an open ville and a modest approach to urban planning. This requires sincerely involving dwellers in the process of planning, leaving space in the plans for unpredictable effects of the cité, and prioritizing, in the words of architect Robert Venturi, potential ‘richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning.’

Towards an architecture of democracy in practice

For those wishing to project the ideal of democracy through architecture, two takeaways are critical: first, embracing modesty of ambition and leaving open the space for deliberation and, second, encouraging reflection on the ideal even after planning and building is complete.

To see how this looks in practice, return to the empty rectangle of gravel in Lukiškės Square. Following redevelopment works carried out in 2020, the square is now a multi­purpose public space. There are green areas, benches, a ground fountain and even a dedicated space for a statue or a monument, if, in the future, the agreement on what it should be comes about. On warm summer days, it at­ tracts a great diversity of people. Workers from nearby office buildings and government agencies traverse it on the way to lunch, the elderly chat on the benches in the shadow of trees, and children run around screaming and wet in the fountain area.

The square is not void of critical reflection, or apolitical in a dystopian sense. Demonstrations and protests often take place there and the use of the square itself from time to time resurfaces for a heated public debate; is it alright, for example, that a place steeped in historical suffering sometimes houses an artificial pop­up beach for a summer season? In that sense, it is a testament to Venturi’s and Sennett’s call for richness as opposed to clarity of meaning.

Because of the historical context of the place, it is not just a space for fun urban activities. Mixing complexity and contradiction, the square fulfils another obligation emphasized by Venturi — the truth it manifests is not in benches, a future statue, or demonstrations, but in its totality. That totality is the projection of the ideal of democracy. Where people once were squeezed between an imposing statue of a revolutionary demagogue and the omnipresent security agency building, marching for superficial ideals they never themselves chose, now there is a space which encourages collective deliberation of the goals of the polity and where one can sit, walk, think or run screaming into the fountain, if that feels like the right thing to do. This, far more than palaces of the people or great statues, reflects what architecture of democracy should look like: it is conducive to collective self­reflection, modest, and open­ended.