Panevėžys is a post-industrial Eastern European city that suffered big population decline in the recent decades.
Aiming to bring positive change to its development and revive the cultural life of the town the city decided to devote a plot of an old soviet cinema to build a new cultural centre. The building is dedicated and named after a local exile artist Stasys Eidrigevičius.
The New Art and Community Centre seeks to create a fully open environment – an urban fabric that ensures engaging, active and inspiring interaction with culture. The proposed art centre is a platform split into equal modules, where each of them carry a distinctive theme, program or architectural expression to ensure the variety of typologies, activities and experiences.
Throughout Lithuania and other Eastern European countries the architecture that was built in the period of soviet occupation is widely understood as the representation of the oppressive regime thus its architecture value, contemporary use, or possible readaptation is often rejected due to political reasons. This position chooses to ignore contemporary concepts of sustainable development and circular economy which encourages reuse and refurbishment instead of consumeristic demolish-rebuild strategies.
We aim to challenge this widely spread view by proposing ways of preserving and integrating soviet buildings into future urban fabrics. However preservation does not have to be a conservation of existing, but rather open and creative reconstruction in order to accommodate contemporary functions.
The new structures get embedded into the preserved preexisting layers of the territory to frame, expose and give new meaning to it. The assemblage of original site artifacts, new volumes and symbols in a former “GARSAS” cinema territory form an open source system which not only serves the city and its community needs but becomes an open platform for their creativity to take place and allows to be changed, expanded or improved.
The museum subdivided into 10×10 m modules seeks to erase boundaries between indoor and outdoor spaces, allowing them to merge and extend each other. The exhibition space spreads through the closed white boxes into the open areas of exiting building creating an interesting journey through the diverse experiences. The spaces open up to the outdoor allowing to organize larger events and bring in more varied background for art to be enhanced. The outdoor open modules are the zones dedicated for changing instalations, workshops or events to take place.
The site subdivided into equal but unique squares loses a clear hierarchy and allows to become entirely open to the surrounding. The 360o orientation to the city ensures the attractiveness and connection to different parts of it. The Assemblage becomes a surreal SEMC mini city – a sign of new architecture – recognisable and distinctive symbol for city of Panevėžys.
The arts centre as a platform becomes an active education and inspiration tool that spreads the culture outside its borders and infect the whole city with culture. The modules can be exported to different public spaces in the city to activate them and become free plots for creative experimentation to take place.
