ABOUT - Rebuild The Wonderful

REBUILD THE WONDERFUL is an initiative that promotes human-centric transformations of the socialist inheritance (leftovers). Collecting atlas of cases of transformation projects in Central and Eastern European countries, spreading the hopeful message in Ukraine and analysing the environment through research of memory and research of interests.

What if our homes and neighborhoods are not supposed to be soulless?

PROBLEM: socialist values are strongly rooted in our built environment and still influence our relations

PURPOSE: to promote human-centric transformation instead of just renovating the built environment

What if all our kindergartens would teach us the comfort and coziness the space can provide?

The features of modern architecture and socialist ideology formed segregation and loneliness among people. The common spaces such as corridors, halls were not programmed to bring people together and did not urge an unintentional encounter. Consequently, the natural connection among people was deleted.

What if many of our streets are supposed to be full of life?

The observations of daily life forced us to think about the environment we are living in. Our old cities like Kiev (Ukraine), Vilnius (Lithuania) or Iasi (Romania), have wonderful urban roots. They have grown from handy and practical human architecture which formed everyday habits we admire. However, in the historical process we have inherited either the soviet modernistic formal and anti-human approach which made an impact on our today’s rules, standards, our “normal”.

The focus on the standard typologies

Obviously, most of our time is spent at home, averagely 8 hours a day depending on the age are spent at work, school or kindergarten and the time in between we are commuting or enjoying leisure time in the public spaces. Undoubtedly, these environments form the way we live, act and feel in a space.

^ Spaces where the day is usually spent

^ Spaces in Lithuania created during soviet occupation period

As a fact, around 50 percent of the whole population in Lithuania lives in blocks of flats from the soviet period. Around 95 percent of the streets and infrastructure were planned in the 2nd half of the last century too. This period in the world’s history is related to the dominance of the Soviet Union, socialist ideology and their desire to equalize all the people. Their propaganda used all possible means to keep a person in the “programmatic” field for as long as possible including architecture. The standard projects were built all over the USSR territory, without any attention to the context and surroundings. Socialist architecture reflects the ideology that forced people to separation, loneliness and dehumanization. Unfortunately, we are still living in this environment without even thinking about its impact on social generosity.

The scope of initiative

The initiative REBUILD THE WONDERFUL focuses on the post-socialist countries, where same standard living conditions were generated. The scope of research includes: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, East Germany, Estonia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Moldova, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Ukraine. In response to today’s war in Ukraine, the Russian Federation and Belarus were excluded from our research scope.

The initiative born in Lithuania is open to everyone. It already unites various architects, urbanists, politicians and other activists. We are collecting knowledge & insights to change the existing status-quo. We want to improve our daily lives not only in Lithuania and the Baltic States, but also in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.

Team

We, architects from Lithuania Gilma Teodora Gylytė, Vadim Babij, Eglė Kliučinskaitė and Edgar Vladimirenko, were raised and grown up in the soviet spaces, which forces us to rethink the environment we are living in. Thus, we have started an independent research on soviet heritage and its influence to one’s social generosity.