Historian
Elina Amann, last edited on 11.10.2022
Name:
Algė Regina (Grinevičiūtė)-Jankevičienė
Life Dates:
1930 – 2015
Country:
Employers:
Kaunas Interdistrict, Department of Architectural Affairs (1955-1956)
Lithuanian Research Institute of Architecture and Building (since 1965)
Institute of Culture and Art (since 1997)
Field of expertise:
History of architecture
Education:
Kaunas Polytechnic Institute (1955)
Awards:
State Prize of the LSSR (1970)
Honoured Architect of the LSSR (1980)
Algė Regina Jankevičienė was born in Kaunas on 27 June 1930. She spent her childhood in an old town surrounded by historic sacred buildings. The place of residence shaped her later career, as she became known as an architectural historian. At the Kaunas Polytechnic Institute, she studied architecture at the Faculty of Civil Engineering from 1949-1955. After graduation, she worked as an architect in the Department of Architectural Affairs of the Kaunas Interdistrict. The young architect did not stay long in the practical field of work and pursued her interests in architectural theory. She switched to research after a year and worked at the Lithuanian Research Institute of Architecture and Construction. Jankevičienė became the scientific secretary in 1966 and headed the Institute’s architectural history department from 1975. After the country’s independence, the architectural historian has additionally worked at the Institute of Culture and Art since 1997. In 2000, she was awarded her habilitation as a doctoral candidate in the humanities.
She received several awards for her work. Among them was the State Prize of the Lithuanian SSR in 1970, and she was recognised as an honoured architect of the LSSR in 1980.
In her work as an architectural historian, she pursued her interests in the sacred architecture of Lithuania. She dealt with the Gothic, Neo-Gothic and Neo-Romanesque periods, as well as the wooden buildings of the Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim and Jewish sacred architecture of the historical territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Her tasks included the study of Lithuanian sacred buildings by researching sources from museums and archives and comparing the information with wooden buildings of other countries and all world religions. She wrote more than 280 scientific studies on the material composition of churches, bell towers and chapels. One of her first books called “Old Town Ensemble of Vilnius” was published in 1969. Another well-known work by Jankevičienė is the book “The Great Synagogue of Vilnius”, which she published in 1996.
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