Lithuanian pavilion, 1968, London

In August 1968, a Soviet industry and trade exhibition opened at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre in London. Next to the main space-themed section with its undertones of Cold War rivalry, particular attention was paid to presenting the occupied Baltic republics, which often served as a showcase for the Soviet Union. All three of them had their own pavilions of around 500 square metres, featuring the best of Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian production, both industrial and handmade, including furniture, musical instruments, souvenirs, and special design objects created especially for the exhibition. The highlight was the joint presentation of fashion collections from Vilnius, Riga, and Tallinn.
The Lithuanian pavilion, designed by 32-year-old architect Tadas Baginskas (b. 1936), combined ethnic symbolism with modernist, minimalist design solutions. The pavilion presented a highly utopian project by Algimantas Stoškus, who created a kinetic stained-glass installation inspired by the architecture of the capital Vilnius. Pieces of coloured cast glass, each weighing around 150 kilograms, were placed on seven vertical strands eight metres tall, with four strands rotating. The glass pieces turned irregularly according to a programme accompanied by avant-garde electro-acoustic music. For the pavilion’s interior, Baginskas designed a unique constructivist panel with eighty-one pieces of amber, each around the size of a fist. The choice of amber as a material was not by accident. Since the interwar period, amber artefacts and jewellery had been the obligatory Lithuanian representative objects at international exhibitions.