The OVEN PAVILION is an interactive architectural sculpture and a localised public space created in 2024 at the SODAS 2123 cultural center (Vitebsko St. 21–23, Vilnius). On April 26 this year, the Oven Pavilion opened its second season!
Seamlessly integrating artistic vision, functionality and its surrounding environment, the OVEN PAVILION consists of both a working stove and the pavilion that frames it, creating a dynamic social place and space. The OVEN PAVILION reintroduces a largely forgotten urban typology, offering the city a communal hearth, a deeply rooted archetype in human culture. By reviving the tradition of gathering around a fire, the project recalls its symbolic role in fostering warmth, protection and unity. The fusion of the pavilion’s architectural form with the elemental presence of the oven creates a hybrid meeting place, establishing a new spatial landmark in Vilnius, both a functional public resource and a sculptural intervention in the urban fabric.
THE OVEN
At the core of the pavilion, the oven functions as both a practical tool and a symbolic entity: an active hearth that extends beyond mere utility. Its design draws from the mystical, shape-shifting alchemists’ ovens of Athanor, transforming it into a living, breathing organism. Beyond heating, baking, cooking and smoking, it carries an element of alchemical transformation, linking fire to the broader themes of renewal and change. The dome-like structure reflects an enduring typology, one that spans cultures and histories, where fire is not only a source of sustenance but also a site of ritual and storytelling.
Across cultures, the hearth has always been synonymous with the heart of the home, both linguistically and spatially. In Lithuanian, namų šerdis/širdis (the core/heart of the home) reflects the same deep-rooted connection found in the English word ‘hearth’, the French foyer, and the Latin focus, all words that tie fire to dwelling, warmth and gathering. Traditionally positioned at the centre of a structure, the oven was more than a place of sustenance; it defined the rhythm of daily life, anchoring stories, rituals, meeting points and communal exchanges.
This communal oven reclaims the primal act of gathering around a fire, rooting it in a contemporary setting. It serves as both a meeting point and a performative space, where the preparation of food becomes a shared act, and where the presence of fire binds people through warmth, conversation and collective experience. Echoing the dual nature of creation and destruction, the oven is more than an interactive sculpture; it is a space for continuous transformation, where the elemental forces of heat and smoke shape both matter and memory.
THE PAVILION
The Oven Pavilion embodies the concept of the Architecture of Acupuncture, where compact, targeted interventions contribute to the wider urban environment. In contrast to full body, master-planned, over-integrated developments, this approach emphasises the value of pinpoint micro-interventions that shape the making of public spaces. Located in a garden near the art community centre SODAS 2123 in Vilnius, the pavilion acts as an ‘exterior room’, part-kitchen, part-gathering space, encouraging social and cultural interaction. At its core is a hybrid oven, which provides warmth both for cooking and a heated bench for sitting on. As an archetype, the oven brings people together through open food making and sharing, fostering communal gravity. By integrating cooking rituals and production into the hybrid pavilion, it provides shelter and a programme for social exchange, contributing to the evolving public character of the culture garden. This project reflects the growing need for small-scale layered interventions capable of addressing the complexities of urban programming and place-making in the context of the increasingly consolidated and standardised development of the built environment. By layering semi-engineered, semi-handcrafted, semi-appropriated parts into one node-environment, the Oven Pavilion, which is now celebrating its second season, unfolds as an open platform and a place of public self-service that encourages a culture of sharing, gathering, co-production and cultural exchange.
The Oven Pavilion opens up as a form of healing architecture on top of inoperative Modernist urban infrastructures, and works as an epicentre of an emerging community garden. It could be seen as an issue in the reimagining of archetypes, gathering around a fire, baking bread, and a public oven, which disappeared during the postwar occupation Modernist era in the Baltic. In this light, the pavilion unfolds as an inverted house, an open room without walls, with the oven at its heart. If the oven traditionally served as the heart of a home, the pavilion becomes its prosthetic hyperbolised limb, an exo-skeleton, extending into the public space as a technological totem, a transparent habitat that radiates from the warmth of the oven, and hosts its events in the panoramic focal point of the culture garden.
CREDITS:
Creators of the Oven Pavilion: Kamilė Krasauskaitė, Ona Lozuraitytė, Petras Išora
Programme curator: Kamilė Krasauskaitė
Oven master: Vytautas Kazimieras Narbutas
Producers: Vitalija Jasaitė, Danutė Gambickaitė
Production coordinator: Eglė Kliučinskaitė
Assistant architect: Gabrielius Dovydėnas
Event programme coordinators: Gabija Stašinskaitė, Neda Rimaitė, Gabrielė Voidė
Communication coordinator: Gustė Grigaliūtė
Graphic designer: Tauras Stalnionis
Translators and Language Editors: Alexandra Bondarev, Rosana Lukauskaitė, Joseph Everatt
Special thanks to: Agnė Kučerenkaitė, Ieva Bagdonaitė, Jurgis Paškevičius, Virginijus Šakalius, Martynas Mockevičius, Emadas UAB
Organiser: Cultural center SODAS2123
Sponsors: Vilniaus miesto savivaldybė, Ballooning.lt
Photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela