#Hypervernacular: Klenuvka
Hypervernacular is an ongoing series of research on urban and rural areas in transition celebrating the ingenuity of non-professional designs driven by sincere care, the sensitivity of nature, “supervised decay,” pure practicality, and limited resources, unrestrained by mainstream or high-society architectural culture. Klenuvka is a representative of shrinking hamlets in Lithuania balancing on the verge of existence. The rapid post-socialist collapse of collective farming in the 90s left it only with the old or the hopeless, and now, with 11 registered inhabitants, it is either destined to become a weekend runaway for the urban generation with rural sentiment or fall into abandonment. A snowstorm working as an isolation mask highlights some of the most eloquent elements.
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Altiba9 issue 016
#Hypervernacular: Markučiai|2020
Markučiai is an iner city village of Vilnius. Despite being just 2 km away from the historical town hall of the Lithuanian capital Vilnius, it has retained a village-like charater for centuries. Enframed by the railway, urban highway, forest and the river it is also on a landing track of the international airport with low passing aisrcrafts. Perhaps partly due to its very hilly terrain (quite uncommon for a Lithuanian landscape) and poor underdeveloped infrastructure it has been terra incognita for most of the urban population for decades. However recently, as all the inner city land prices have been skyrockting, Markučiai has been undergoing accelerating gentrification. Nevertheless the population of Markučiai is still very diverse and unique and such are its spaces and architecture, even with the increasing amount of
#Hypervernacular: Marcinkonys| 2024
Marcinkonys - is a village in the southern Lithuania, close to the Belarusian border. It is located in the midst of the national park, surrounded by sandy pine forests rich with lakes and swampy nature reserves. It is blessed with charms of the region rich in forest resources and hospitable people. The region was not very heavily affected by the collective farming, since the land is sandy and suitable for agriculture. Hence some of the adjacent villages have kept their unique architecture. In Marcinkonys most of the houses are not that old, dating less than a century, but the attention to details, colours and decor has been sustained and is could be traced trough the links to the pictuturesque forests. The original population is dying out and the village is turning into a summer residence for those who inherited or newcommers in love with the surrounding nature.
#Concrete & Foliage: Vilnius | 2023-
Despite the promise of modernist visionaries, like Le Corbusier, to create residential towers in the park, modernist housing estates in the Eastern and Central Europe of former communist states were built essentially to displace rural population as a labour force for the industries in urban centres. The prefab houses were often inhabited while the public infrastructure was lagging for years. In Vilnius, some patches of forest were integrated and preserved, but most of the greenery was planted ad-hoc by the residents or have been self-seeded. Now, after half a century, there is a diversely rich ecological structure - an entourage for the extensive and repetitive concrete blocks. Through the informal practices of gardening, landscaping, and amateur land art, the customization and humanisation of space has been enabled, thus mitigating the trauma of soviet occupation, enforced limitation and detachment from the countryside. It might be seen as a domain of resistance and creativity that opposes dominant power structures, as a concept of H. Lefebvre’s lived space would suggest. Despite the gradual socio-spatial segregation, more than half of Lithuania’s population still live in the housing estates. A great national effort backed by the EU is launched to upgrade and insulate 190,000 apartment houses nationwide with a primary goal of reducing carbon emissions for heating. However, these projects often lack a comprehensive approach towards spatial quality, thus the unique character of greenery is being lost. The project is focused on the transforming power of nature. As uncontrollable as it may be, here it is revealed as a tool used by humans to transform their alienating environment. It investigates the unplanned green structures and landscape folklore in the socialist housing estates of Vilnius, as a humanising factor and an antidote to the expansive and monotonous brutalist architecture saturated with socio-spatial problematics.Perhaps partly due to its very hilly terrain (quite uncommon for a Lithuanian landscape) and poor underdeveloped infrastructure it has been terra incognita for most of the urban population for decades. However recently, as all the inner city land prices have been skyrockting, Markučiai has been undergoing accelerating gentrification. Nevertheless the population of Markučiai is still very diverse and unique and such are its spaces and architecture, even with the increasing amount of