Kaunas Concert Centre

The Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis Concert Centre was the subject of a one-stage anonymous design contest held in Kaunas in 2017. The brief sought concept designs for a €30m venue: a modern concert hall of international standing that would also provide multifunctional spaces for conferences, congresses and symposia. The site lay in the city where Rasa Navasaityte had attended the M. K. Čiurlionis Art Gymnasium from 1993 to 2000, a school named after the same Čiurlionis, and her entry for lab-eds was developed as a family of parts before it was developed as a building.

Each part is an assembly of horizontal slabs, thin columns and stairs: a stair rising into a stack of wide slabs, a landing with a slab cantilevering past it, tiers stepping like an amphitheatre, two decks carried on a row of columns. The parts were drawn in white with figures for scale and with slab edges as thin as card. They share a grammar but not a shape, and none of them is a room. What each one fixes is how a floor meets a stair, how a column meets an edge, and how much of the outside a terrace admits.

The building is what happens when the parts are strung into a chain. Lifted on stilts over the water and closed with glass between the slabs, the chain becomes a layered facade of edges, columns and reflections: the direct expression of the assembly rather than a skin applied to it. Seen from the water, the concert centre stands on its stilts as a stack of terraces; seen from the grassy slope, the terraces step down toward the river; seen close, the facade is nothing but the parts, their slabs and columns repeated at the scale of the whole.

The concert centre continues the practice’s research on architecture between the parts, in which design moves from the whole to the relations among a small vocabulary of elements: what a part can be, how it meets its neighbour, and what a public space becomes as the residue between them. Navasaityte presented that research under the title Between the Parts in a Plexus Talk at the Bartlett School of Architecture on 25 January 2018 and in an exhibition of the same name at the Architecture Building in Innsbruck from 31 January to 7 February 2018, and she set out its method in full in her dissertation, Between the Parts: A Relational Methodology for Ecological Design (University of Innsbruck, 2026).