The legends of Lithuanian architecture who shaped modern Vilnius – Algimantas Nasvytis, Vytautas Edmundas Čekanauskas, Vytautas Brėdikis, and Gediminas Baravykas – speak in this book in their authentic voices about how they planned, designed, and built in Lithuania during the Soviet period. They were interviewed in 1992 by a Lithuanian American, then a student at Berkeley and today a professor at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Jonas V. Mačiuika.
The four interviews are accompanied by introductory essays by architectural historians Prof. John V. Mačiuika and Prof. Marija Drėmaitė, which offer different ways of reading and reflecting on the controversial legacy of the Soviet era and of searching for a personal relationship with one’s living environment.
The book is richly illustrated with carefully selected archival photographs and images of the interviewees, as well as photographs from the personal collections of the book’s editor.