vladas švipas: pušalotas > bauhaus > kaunas > new york

The book explores the life and professional journey of architect Vladas Švipas (1900–1965). Švipas was the only Lithuanian to study at the Bauhaus. From 1924 to 1926 he attended Wassily Kandinsky’s wall-painting workshop, and in 1928 undertook an internship at the Bauhaus architecture office. Later in Kaunas, Lithuania, he developed ideas of rational planning. At the end of the Second World War, Švipas experienced the fate of a refugee, living in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany from 1945 to 1949. With the assistance of former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, he emigrated to the United States and began a new stage of his life in New York. 

The book highlights not only Švipas’s personal story but, above all, his creative trajectory as a modernist architect. It is not merely the biography of an individual architect, but also a transnational history of professional migration in architecture, unfolding amid changing political regimes and historical ruptures.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marija Drėmaitė is an architectural historian, author, curator, and professor at Vilnius University, awarded the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts in 2025. Her research on 20th-century architecture, modernisation, and industrial culture has resulted in several successful books, including Baltic Modernism. Architecture and Housing in Soviet Lithuania (Dom publishers, 2017), Architecture of Optimism: The Kaunas Phenomenon, 1918–1940 (ed.) (Lapas, 2018), Arno FUNKtionalism. The Life and Work of Architect Arno Funkas (1898–1957) (ČDM, 2022; Lapas 2025), and Lithuanian Architects Assess the Soviet Era: 1992 Oral History Tapes (with John V. Maciuika, Lapas, 2020). See more here.