Viktorija Serbentienė (Lithuanian Institute of History)
Based on the ethnographic field research conducted in 2016 and 2022, during which the contemporary detached residential houses built after 1990 were studied, the differences between architecture in the city, suburbs and more remote areas were not considerable. On the contrary, the research has revealed the ongoing decline of boundaries between the city and rural areas and has highlighted the importance of the city in more distant areas, up to 50 km away from Vilnius. For this reason, the contemporary detached residential houses are analysed as exceeding the boundaries of Vilnius.
The aim of this paper is to present the most prominent features of Vilnius architecture and its nearby areas, defined as vernacular (local) architecture. The main objectives are 1) to provide methodological framework that allows to see architecture expanding the boundaries of the city as a homogenous object, which also corresponds to the concept of vernacular architecture; 2) to present the methods of ethnographic field research and the main collected data; and 3) to reveal the peculiarities of architecture under consideration.
The architecture of Vilnius and its nearby areas is defined using the concept of vernacular architecture. This term has not been widely used in Lithuanian historiography. Although the concept varies, usually it is defined as utilitarian architecture, which meets human needs and is built with their own hands (Rapoport 1969; Oliver 2006). Vernacular architecture has come to be understood more broadly only in recent decades, i.e., as an object that corresponds with the characteristics and needs of the contemporary society. Despite the technocratic nature of the society, globalization and modernization that have been strongly affecting the place, the research searched for the features showing the house owner’s ethnic and cultural identity. The idea of architecture as an object extending human body (Carsten, Hugh-Jones 1995) and a parallel of language (Norberg-Schulz 1985; Daujotytė-Pakerienė 2019) has been employed in this study. The search for human features in architecture was based on the concept of material registers applied by Victor Buchli in the field of architectural anthropology, which includes visual, tactile and phonetically perceived objects as well as texts, sign systems and embodied experiences (Buchli 2013). The development of these theoretical ideas, supplemented by the ethnographic field research, enables to reveal the relationship between the human and architecture more broadly, and to define it as a relationship between the object (architecture) and the subject (homeowner).