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‘It is always easier to talk about architecture when observing it from the outside, from the distance of time,’ architect Audrius Ambrasas once said in an interview. The architect’s second monograph, Architecture as a Puzzle, presents the studio’s work, giving a more detailed look at both built and un-built creative visions from 2014 to 2024, reflecting on un-won architectural competitions, un-realised ideas, intertwining, interrupting and re-emerging projects and sketches. An important part of the book is the research study – which has itself become a narrative – carried out between 2019 and 2023, on three myths of Vilnius: the Lukiškės Square, the meridian axis, and Tautos Namai (House of the Nation) on Tauras Hill.

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In 2014, Audrius Ambrasas Architects’ first book bore the first LAPAS logo, establishing architecture as a distinctive publishing direction. One of the first contemporary Lithuanian architecture albums of the time included a number of large, visible and significant projects implemented by the studio. Although, over the last decade, the studio has realised fewer projects, the identity of Audrius Ambrasas as an architect-artist and as an architect-thinker has become increasingly apparent. As he says himself, he sees architecture as a puzzle. Or is it the other way around: architecture for him is a tool for solving the puzzles of the city, the state, and perhaps even life? This is evident in his studio’s second book ten years later.

— Ū. A.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Audrius Ambrasas (1962) is one of Lithuania’s most prominent architects, a laureate of the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts, awarded ‘for sensitive planning of urban spaces and professional responsibility’. His major projects include the Ventspils Science and Innovation Centre VIZIUM (2022), the PAUPYS home for business in Vilnius (2020), BALTIC HEARTS business centre in Vilnius (2014), the RUPERT creative industries centre in Vilnius (2013), the DNB bank headquarters in Riga (2010), the SWEDBANK headquarters in Vilnius (2009), and the Europa office and commercial complex in Vilnius (2004).

CREDITS

editor: Ūla Ambrasaitė
publishing assistant: Elena Paleckytė
assistant editor: Simona Osipovaitė
translator: Skaistė Aleksandravičiūtė
english language editors: Andrej Stuart-Thompson, Skaistė Aleksandravičiūtė
design: Audrius Ambrasas, Aurelija Slapšytė
project manager: Jonė Juchnevičiūtė

ISBN 978-609-8198-85-0
520 pages, 225x280x39 mm, 0,9 kg
soft cover, colour illustrations

published by LAPAS books, February 2024

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