November 10, 2025, 7pm
Betono aklg. 16
Vilnius 03153
Lithuania
Lithuania’s National Institute of Architecture (NAI) invites to the closing lecture of its inaugural year, presented by Filipe Magalhães, a founding partner of the acclaimed Portuguese studio Fala Atelier.
Today, Fala Atelier stands among the widely discussed practices in the contemporary Western architectural framework. Their projects have been exhibited at the Venice and Chicago Architecture Biennales and featured in The Architectural Review, Domus, A+U, 2G (a monographic issue).
The Porto-based studio functions in the everyday with a playful sense of precision. Through the transformation of existing buildings, they challenge the notion that reconstruction is secondary; instead, it becomes a means to invent new architectural language within existing contexts and urban fabric.
The lecture will reflect on architecture as a playful yet critical practice, marking the Institute’s growing engagement with key international voices. It situates NAI within ongoing critical dialogue on architecture, heritage, and urban regeneration through aligning two distinct urban milieus: Portugal and Lithuania.
We will also talk about Fala Atelier’s strategies of adaptive reuse, spatial layering, and material intelligence. All of this faced against complex historical, infrastructural, and social conditions of Lithuanian metropolises, revealing the possibilities and limitations of parallel architectural philosophies.
The event will take place in the capital Vilnius, in the redeveloped industrial site known as Betono Fabrikas. Located in the Vilkpėdė district, the building occupies a former factory territory originally dedicated to producing prefabricated reinforced-concrete structural elements for large-scale residential construction during the Soviet era.
NAI itself is being established as a centre for architectural research, heritage, public engagement, and education in Kaunas, the country’s second largest city. Its future home, the former Kaunas Central Post Office, is a landmark of inter-war modernist architecture completed in 1932 by architect Feliksas Vizbaras.
The building exemplifies Kaunas’ distinctive modernist style (1919–1939), combining functionalist design with national ornamentation, and is part of the UNESCO World Heritage List recognition for the city’s modernist urban ensemble. It was officially inscribed in 2023, after years of work by the local architectural community.
The Institute will be the only one in Lithuania to collect and present artefacts of national significance in architecture. Envisaged to occupy approximately 5,000 m² on the city’s principal pedestrian artery, NAI will also include permanent and temporary exhibition spaces, a Reading Room and library, a conference hall, artist residencies, a café, digital workrooms, archives, and educational facilities for younger audiences.
NAI is headed by Kęstutis Kuizinas, who won the official competition a year before. He is best known as the Founding Director of the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius, which, under his leadership, has become one of the most important contemporary art institutions in Eastern Europe, helping to shape the international careers of several generations of Lithuanian artists, curators, and art historians.
While the reconstruction and readaptation of the former Kaunas Central Post Office are in progress, Lithuania’s National Institute of Architecture operates from a temporary office that also serves as an event space and a Reading Room at Kaunas’ Kęstučio str. It’s open to visitors Wednesday through Friday.
Its library is already growing with generous support from local and international publishing houses such as Lapas, Spector Books, MIT Press, Princeton University Press, and more.
We invite international colleagues, researchers, practitioners, and students to engage with NAI as a dynamic centre for architectural scholarship, critical discourse, and cultural activation across Lithuania, fostering connections between local urban realities, national heritage, and international architectural debates.
The lecture of Filipe Magalhães of Fala Atelier is made possible in collaboration with Do Architects, authors of Betono fabrikas regeneration project, whose work in adaptive reuse exemplifies contemporary architectural innovation; with additional support and refinements from the historic brewery Kauno Alus.
