New doctoral dissertation

VILNIUS TECH Library invites you to follow the published new dissertations. The dissertation „Contextuality of Late Baroque: the Influence of Place on Church Architecture in the Western Grand Duchy of Lithuania“ prepared at VILNIUS TECH by Kostas Biliūnas. The dissertation was prepared in 2021–2025. Scientific consultant – Prof. Dr Almantas Liudas Samalavičius.

The dissertation was defended at the public meeting of the Dissertation Defence Council of the Scientific Field of History and Theory of Arts in the Aula Doctoralis Meeting Hall of Vilnius Gediminas Technical University at 2 p.m. on 6 March 2026.

The dissertation examines the relationship between church architecture and place. It focuses on the Late Baroque period as the last pre-modern epoch in which architecture expressed an invisible semantic layer. Using a phenomenological approach, it investigates whether churches built in the mid-eighteenth century in the western Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Livonian Voivodeship exhibit contextuality, identifies the forms of this phenomenon, and its connections with the culture of the Baroque era. The theoretical part addresses the following tasks: to examine and define the contemporary concept of nature, and to determine the principles and expressions of the properties that may underlie contextuality. The practical part addresses the tasks of developing a research methodology, conducting a study of churches and their places, and establishing and explaining the influence of place on the architectural expression of the churches. The dissertation comprises an introduction, four chapters, general conclusions, a list of sources and literature, and a list of the author’s publications on the dissertation topic. The First Chapter analyses the concept of nature, with particular attention to the compromise philosophy, in which scientific knowledge is directly integrated with metaphysics and religion. The contributions of polymaths Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian Wolff to a holistic, hierarchical understanding of nature are highlighted. The Second Chapter focuses on the concept of architecture. Baroque is presented as an art of crisis, whose language is characterised by the desire to unite opposites. Its theoretical foundation is linked to Leibniz’s philosophy, and the principle of open unity is formulated. This theoretical model provides a basis for understanding the contextuality of churches, and how the model is expressed architecturally is discussed. The Third Chapter addresses the phenomenology of place and architecture, and develops an individual combined contextuality method. The Fourth Chapter presents the practical study, discussing 43 case studies and providing examples from two of them. Three strategies of contextuality are identified, showing how Late Baroque churches can establish a contextual relationship with the natural landscape. Nine scholarly articles on the dissertation topic have been published in peer-reviewed journals: four are indexed in Web of Science and Scopus, one in Scopus, and four in other international databases. The research process and results have been presented in five papers at international scientific conferences and in four seminars in Lithuania and abroad.

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