ABSTRACT
The stringencies of World War II forced a highly accomplished and successful cadre of Lithuanian-born architects and artists to immigrate to the United States after the war. In order to re-establish a coherent professional identity for themselves these artists incorporated modernist architecture and theory into the churches they built in their adopted homeland. They quickly and eagerly acknowledged the advantages of new types of materials and emerging technologies. Their extensive commissions contributed to the American cultural landscape in cities like Cleveland, Chicago, and New York. Their churches include prominent Lithuanian iconographic elements, especially stained glass, liturgical furnishings, and interior decoration. The result was an integration of vernacular forms and modernist vocabulary, a translation, as it were, of traditional wooden church architecture into masonry, glass and steel. These churches served the spiritual life of Lithuanian American communities for more than half a century.
