The sixth season of the Experiments’ Platform is already well underway at the Architecture Fund. Organised since 2021, this mentorship, alternative education, and idea development programme has, as it does every year, invited participants to explore and discover alternative architectural practices.

Curated by architects and researchers Aistė Gaidilionytė and Kamilė Vasiliauskaitė, the sixth season of the platform invites a focus on ‘Affording Environments’ – understood here as an entirety of material and immaterial factors that create a certain medium for interaction. This is an invitation to critically reflect on the phenomenon of homogenising spaces and the ever-expanding ‘Smooth City’, and to consider how human-made environments can foster inclusivity, empathy, and resistance to productivity and control.

We are delighted to present the four experiments selected through the open call and their authors, who will continue to develop their ideas guided by the platform’s mentors.


Titas Joneliūkštis and Fausta Šeduikė – ‘Please do not improve this area’

Titas is an interior designer whose practice bridges spatial design, material experimentation, and hands-on making. He approaches construction not simply as execution but as a process of exploration, learning, and creative inquiry.

Fausta is an interior design student at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She explores overlooked environments and informal spatial practices, questioning established views on value, function, and the built environment.

In their experimental investigation, the authors will explore the hidden potential of spaces left outside conventional planning. Through walking, observation, and subtle interventions, the project will examine informal paths, improvised gathering places, and overlooked urban gaps, asking what becomes possible when a place is allowed to remain open, undefined, and collectively shaped by its users. Rather than proposing new designs, the experiment will invite a shift in perspective: perhaps the value of some environments lies precisely in the fact that they have not yet been improved.

Experiment mentor – architect and independent researcher Pablo Encinas Alonso.


Laura Jančiauskaitė – ‘Weaving into’

Laura is a spatial intervention practitioner. Her work involves willow weaving and site-responsive processes guided by material agency. The author follows material action and embodied making in uncertain spaces that emerge through relation rather than control.

This experiment will be an attempt to approach the earth through another body. Laura is not interested in space for humans, but in space where humans are not the only participants. Weaving becomes a way of exploring the relationship between place and material. What happens when space is no longer a finite object, but becomes a process involving time? Can we learn from the more-than-human world not by copying its forms, but by taking in its ways of working?

Experiment mentor – landscape architect Ella Prokkola.


Guostė Marija Ringelytė – ‘Shell’

Guostė Marija is an artist, currently studying for a master’s degree in sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. In her creative practice, she tackles issues of materiality, vulnerability, disappearance, and fragility. The artist mostly works with large-scale sculptures made from organic, sustainable, and unstable materials.

At the Experiments’ Platform, Guostė will explore human senses and the relationship with newly formed spaces in the city. The experiment’s author intends to seek answers by using the intervention of sculptural – fragile, decaying, unaesthetic – objects in sterile, newly built spaces. This confrontation will aim to irritate the gaze and senses of people working or living there. It will reflect on what would happen to a new, clean, aesthetic space if an unattractive, uncomfortable, decaying work appeared there. The long-term preservation of the work is deliberately abandoned; the author is intrigued by its independence and the friction between existence and disappearance.

Experiment mentor – artist and spatial practitioner Aušra Česnauskytė.


Ieva Julija Bagdonaitė and Uljana Kudriavceva – ‘PlayTime’

Ieva is a recently graduated architect who completed her master’s degree at Vilnius TECH. She is interested in sustainable architectural practices and explores themes of adaptability, reuse, and community housing.

Uljana is a master’s student in architecture and urbanism whose practice focuses on the socio-spatial identities of places and community-based design approaches. In her studies, she explores ecological, social, and spatial relationships.

During this experiment, the role of designated playgrounds in Vilnius and their relationship with the urban environment will be investigated, exploring how the city itself might become a landscape for play. Prompted by the standardised character of existing playgrounds, the participants seek to rethink play beyond prescribed equipment and sterile, enclosed spaces. Through mapping and spatial interventions, the project will look at how different urban situations can be used for play. It raises the question: how could playgrounds encourage children to explore, experiment, and take ownership of their environment?

Experiment mentor – architect and spatial artist Ulla Alla.