Migrant modernists: The making of national architects in Lithuania in the 1930s and their survival strategies in the 1950s

The new national states that emerged on the European map in 1918 following the collapse of the great European empires in the wake of World War I became enthusiastic participants in the race to modernise, hoping to keep pace with global trends and become more European in the process. Renewal was the central goal of many European cities. This was particularly so in the newly restored cities or those newly designated as administrative capitals such as Kaunas, which became the provisional capital of the Republic of Lithuania from 1919 to 1939. These cities faced similar challenges: ridding themselves of imperial pasts, architectural legacies and symbols, changing their urban environment, creating new political centres and constructing new government facilities. The question of national architects became similarly important. Through the lives of the modern architects who were compelled to change their citizenship or suffered exile, forced migration or genocide, we can study the effect of social and political change, and in particular political ruptures. This paper follows how architects, collectively as well as individually, developed as a modern group of socially engaged intellectuals in 1930s. It then considers how they reacted to political changes, such as the first communist occupation of Lithuania in 1940, the subsequent Nazi occupation in 1941, and the return of the Red Army in 1944, when most of the architects in private practice emigrated to the West. Finally, it illustrates how those architects who remained adapted to the new political rule in Soviet Lithuania in the 1950s.