Architektūrinės ir istorinės Klaipėdos vizijų konkurencija: drąsūs sprendimai ar darnus išsaugojimas?
The Competition Between Architectural and Historical Visions of Klaipeda: Brave Decisions vs. Sustainable Preservation

Summary/Abstract: The issue of the relation of Klaipeda’s image to urban planning has been the subject of intense debate. Old and new buildings transforming Klaipeda’s image at once correct and adjust the city’s past: its past can for example be reshaped, renewed, preserved or destroyed by architectural means. Thus architecture becomes an object of historical interest. In this article the analytic scheme proposed by the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri is employed. Importantly, Tafuri dissociates architects from architectural historians: the former is operative, utopian and future-oriented; the latter is critical, memorial and oriented to the past. Between the two extremes Tafuri places the figure of the architectural critic, who is dependent on both architecture (as an object) and history (as knowledge). Such a schema is however incomplete as Tafuri ignores the figure of the expert of heritage protection. In the expert of heritage protection Tafuri’s schema can be refigured around four categories: theory (historian and critic), practice (architect and expert of heritage protection), past (historian and expert of heritage protection) and future (architect and critic). This upgraded framework is applied to the case of Klaipeda city in order to describe recent encounters, controversies and conflicts between two predominant visions – architectural and historical – concerning city planning and the protection of material heritage.

• Details
• Contents