A private residential house is one of the most fertile formats for an architectural manifesto. Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Robert Venturi, and Frank Gehry have all contributed iconic residential projects to architectural history – works that transformed prevailing aesthetic paradigms or embodied fundamental shifts in architectural thinking. Valdas Ozarinskas’s diploma project, completed at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1986 (supervisor: Jūras Balkevičius; structural engineer: Viktoras Ražaitis), can likewise be situated within this intellectual field. By selecting a deconstructivist form for a rural farmstead in a national park, Ozarinskas offered a direct provocation, positioning the project at the threshold between architecture and conceptual art.

The combination of deconstructivism and ethnic architectural traditions broke the mould of conventional thinking. While this stance may partly be attributed to a youthful desire to make a bold statement and to challenge stagnant terminology and ideas, the precise juxtaposition of binary oppositions – tradition and progress, regionalism and globalism – significantly expanded the boundaries of academic openness and innovation in the late Soviet period. By proposing a solution that diverged as far as possible from the expected scenario, Ozarinskas exposed the intellectual narrowness and ultimately artificial nature of attempts to define architecture as strictly ‘local’ or ‘global’, ‘traditional’ or ‘modern’, ‘conceptual’ or ‘pragmatic’.

– Vaidas Petrulis

Author: Valdas Ozarinskas

Diploma supervisor: Jūras Balkevičius

Structural engineer: Viktoras Ražaitis

Photographer: Gintautas Trimakas

Exhibited:

1986 – Review of Diploma Projects, Vilnius Academy of Arts

2016 – Presented at Nulinis laipsnis, Vilnius

2018 – The photographs were exhibited in An Architect without Architecture? Valdas Ozarinskas Retrospective, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius

Architecture