Cinema “Lietuva”

The new offer of services was supposed to ensure Soviet material well-being and a rich leisure time. For this mass culture of entertainment and leisure, new spaces and places had to be created, creating an imitation of material abundance and consumption. Such cultural buildings were primarily cinemas.

With the expansion of the cinema network and the beginning of the production of wide-format films, the construction of wide-screen cinemas became particularly relevant. In 1959, a modern 1000-seat cinema “Lietuva” was designed.

The architecture of the building is typical of the early socialist modernism with strict forms, which had already entered the period of architectural industrialization. Many such larger or smaller reinforced concrete “boxes” with a fully glazed vestibule and a spacious square in front of the main facade were built in many cities of the USSR and Lithuania.

Privatized in 2002, the cinema “Lietuva” is important not only as an architectural object but also as a former public cultural space. Having changed several owners and provoking discussions in society for a long time about its fate, the cinema was demolished in 2017.