Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis

Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis (10 March 1893 – 21 May 1993) was a Lithuanian architect most active in interwar Lithuania (1926–1939). He was the father of Vytautas Landsbergis, the first Lithuanian head of state after independence from the Soviet Union.

Landsbergis's father, the playwright Gabrielius Landsbergis-Žemkalnis, was an active supporter of the Lithuanian National Revival. Landsbergis studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. During World War I, he was drafted into the Imperial Russian Army and completed a school for junior officers. Upon return to Lithuania, he joined the newly established Lithuanian Army and fought in the Lithuanian Wars of Independence. He was taken prisoner by Poland, but managed to escape. He then continued his studies of architecture at the Higher School of Architecture in Rome (now a department of the Sapienza University). Landsbergis returned to Lithuania in 1926 and became one of the most popular and sought-after architects in Kaunas, the temporary capital of Lithuania. He was one of the leaders of a group of about 40 modernist architects working in Kaunas. Eight of his buildings were included in a group 44 buildings awarded the European Heritage Label in 2015. Overall, the modernist architecture of interwar Kaunas has been placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2017.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Lithuanians started the anti-Soviet June Uprising, Landsbergis became the minister of infrastructure in the short-lived Provisional Government of Lithuania. When his son Gabrielius was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1944, Landsbergis followed his son from one prison to another until Gabrielius was freed by the Americans in April 1945. Landsbergis became a displaced person (DP) and taught at a Lithuanian DP camp and later at the University of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in Munich. In 1949, he emigrated to Australia and worked there as an architect at the Housing and Construction Department in Melbourne. In 1959, he returned to Kaunas in Soviet Lithuania and worked as architect and restorer of monuments until retirement in 1984.