Let's Courtyard!

workshop

2024

Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Faculty of Architecture 

​Vilnius, Lithuania

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In collaboration with Madli Kaljuste

Participants: Gabrielius Dovydėnas, Urtė Veronika Uselytė, Viltė Matuliauskaitė, Aurelija Aleškaitytė, Justina Jakimavičiūtė, Kamila Olševska, Diana Tomaševič, Jolanta Šiurpickaja, Dominykas Dobilas, Barbora Keperšaitė, Miglė Mindelytė, Evelina Vasiljevaitė, Lina Jankūnaitė, Justina Bražinskaitė, Tetiana Tkachenko, Martyna Ačiūtė, Agna Petkevičiūtė, Deimantė Rakštelytė, Rasa Bernatonytė, Christopher Osei Kusi

Guest lectures led by: Ella Prokkola, Luka Smišek, Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonai

Photos by: Kamilė Vasiliauskaitė

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The workshop Let's Courtyard! initiated together with Architecture Students’ Club (ASK) delved into a spatial activist role by physically inhabiting a courtyard of the Vilnius Tech Faculty of Architecture in Vilnius, which is semi-public but currently laid out in concrete tiles and taken up by cars. The workshop tackled the themes of circularity, secondary use, and biodiversity by gathering used materials and building communal objects in the courtyard, as well as planting greenery.

The project resulted in an open event where the community of the faculty and city dwellers were invited to enjoy the ‘commoned’ courtyard by introducing the new objects – tables, chairs, and plant pots created from reused materials. The created objects stayed as a gift to the courtyard, prompting the future use of the space as an open common space. Together with the participants of the workshop, we read and discussed texts, observed examples of similar actions introduced by a landscape architect based between Paris and Helsinki Ella Prokkola, by architect and designer based in the Hague Luka Smišek and artists Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonai based in Boston. Together we also constructed the objects and planted herbal plants.