"Lazdynai" is also an old name of Krasnoznamensk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia

Lazdynai is an eldershio in Vilnius

Vilnius

Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, and its largest city, with a population of 560,190 as of 2010. It is the seat of the Vilnius city municipality and of the Vilnius district municipality. It is also the capital of Vilnius County...

, Lithuania

Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the biggest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark...

, situated on the right bank of the Neris River. It covers area of 9.9 square kilometres (3.8 sq mi) and has population of approximately 32,000 (according to the 2001 census).

History

Since 1950s, the Baltic states

Baltic states

The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...

 experienced fast population growth and faced housing shortages. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Khrushchev

Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...

 put forth his program of fast residential construction, based on prefabricated panel building

Panel building

Panel building may refer to buildings of one of the following types:*Built of structural insulated panels*Built of pre-fabricated concrete blocks, named differently in various countries....

s dubbed khrushchovka

Khrushchovka

Khrushchovka is a type of low-cost, cement-paneled or brick three- to five-storied apartment building which was developed in the USSR during the early 1960s, during the time its namesake Nikita Khrushchev directed the Soviet government.-History:...

s, it threatened the integrity of the well-preserved historical style of Vilnius. A group of architects struggled against the intrusion of khrushchovkas into the historical city center. Eventually they were awarded with the project to build a satellite city outside Vilnius. The chosen area was close to a Polish village of Leszczyniaki or Lazdynai in Lithuanian, situated southeast of old Vilnius. Both names, Leszczyniaki and Lazdynai apparently derive from the word for "hazelnut tree

Corylus avellana

Corylus avellana, the Common Hazel, is a species of hazel native to Europe and western Asia, from the British Isles south to Iberia, Greece, Turkey and Cyprus, north to central Scandinavia, and east to the central Ural Mountains, the Caucasus, and northwestern Iran. It is an important component of...

": Polish leszczyna and Lithuanian lazdynas. In Polish language the term leszczyniak (singular for "leszczyniaki") also means "a person from Leszno

Leszno

Leszno is a town in central Poland with 63,955 inhabitants . Situated in the southern part of the Greater Poland Voivodeship since 1999, it was previously the capital of the Leszno Voivodeship . The town has county status.-History:...

 or Leszno Voivodeship

Leszno Voivodeship

Leszno Voivodeship was a unit of administrative division and local government in Poland from 1975 to 1998, superseded by Greater Poland Voivodeship. Its capital city was Leszno.-Major cities and towns :* Leszno...

", see, e.g., the usage here).

The architects decided to go against the Soviet architectural style and based their design on study of the architecture of Finland

Finland

Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...

. Initially the authorities monitored the project with suspicion, but eventually it was accepted, and in 1974 the leading figures of the Lazdynai project (architects Vytautas Čekanauskas

Vytautas Cekanauskas

Vytautas Edmundas Čekanauskas is a Lithuanian architect, professor of the Vilnius Academy of Art....

, Vytautas Brėdikis, Vytautas Balčiūnas, and Gediminas Valiuškis

Gediminas Valiuškis

Gediminas Valiuškis was a Lithuanian architect, with expertise in design of residential buildings. Valiuškis graduated from the Vilnius Institute of Art...

 and engineers Algimantas Kleinotas and Vincentas Šileika) were awarded the Lenin Prize

Lenin Prize

The Lenin Prize was one of the most prestigious awards of the USSR, presented to individuals for accomplishments relating to science, literature, arts, architecture, and technology. It was created on June 23, 1925 and was awarded until 1934. During the period from 1935 to 1956, the Lenin Prize was...

in architecture.