Monitoring intelligibility changes of Kaunas interwar modernism buildings

Abstract

The research based on the project “Heritage in Depopulated European Areas”  (HerInDep), started in April 2023 and examines the transformation of Interwar  (the years between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the  Second World War) architecture and its influence on the social and urban  development of Kaunas, Lithuania. Kaunas, particularly its central region, holds a  significant concentration of Interwar modernist architecture, which has endured  substantial urban changes during the Soviet era and pressures from business  developments post-1990. In 2023, Kaunas’ modernist architecture was nominated  to the UNESCO World Heritage list under “Modernist Kaunas:  Architecture of Optimism, 1919-1939,” reflecting its transformation into  Lithuania’s provisional capital. Approximately 80% of these heritage properties  have distinct characteristics meriting legal protection. The idea of the article is to  propose and validate a methodology for assessing the legibility of immovable  cultural heritage in an urban environment. Such a methodology could be used  not only to understand better the importance of cultural heritage in creating  urban landscape identity but also to monitor changes in legibility due to various  transformations of the urban fabric, even in the absence of destroyed or  otherwise physically affected heritage properties. The paper focuses on the presentation of the space syntax or mathematical graph-based intelligibility  model which, because of its simulative natures offers predictive possibilities while  pointing out further possibilities of its use for monitoring purposes.