Image: Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Vilnius
That journey ran through interwar Kaunas, a displaced-persons camp in Germany and New York, where he had to adapt to life as an emigrant.
Švipas studied in Wassily Kandinsky’s mural-painting workshop at the Bauhaus from 1924 to 1926, then undertook a 1928 placement at the Bauhaus architecture office led by Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer. During the Second World War, he navigated between Soviet and Nazi occupation regimes before moving west and living at the Dilingen DP camp in Germany from 1945 to 1949.
His professional legacy encompassed public service, regional and territorial planning, and the preparation of rules and regulations, presenting a broader field for the modern architect’s profession. In the 1930s, as head of the Construction Department of the Chamber of Agriculture, Švipas disseminated Bauhaus ideas through the press and public sphere, large-scale rural-modernization programmes, settlers’ homestead designs, the ‘Mūrinės Lietuvos’ plan and efforts to define an ideal dwelling.
The exhibition’s curator, Dr. Marija Drėmaitė, notes that Švipas’s name remains relatively little known even within Lithuania’s art and architecture communities. She attributes this, probably, to the fact that he designed only five residential buildings in Kaunas.
