Palanga Summer Reading Room

• Library Services  
  - Book lending
  - On-site reading of art books and periodicals  
  - Personalized book collections  
  - Access to digital resources  
  - Public internet access 
• Cultural and educational activities  
  - Events, meetings, exhibitions, concerts
  - Educational programs for families with children and adults
  - Project-based activities
  - Movie nights
  - Tours
• Other  
  - Public-access computer workstations  
  - Open work and relaxation areas
  - Printing, copying, and scanning services
  - Sales of publications from the Science and Encyclopedia Center
  - Rental space  

• Call for Event Proposals 
  We invite you to submit proposals for events related to literature and other cultural fields. For more information on the application process for events, please click here. 
• Call for Exhibition Proposals 
  We invite you to submit applications for exhibitions planned for the exhibition spaces of the Palanga Summer Reading Room. More information on the application process for exhibitions can be found here. 
• Space Rental for Cultural Activities 
  The Palanga Summer Reading Room offers the opportunity to rent spaces for various cultural initiatives and events. More information about space rental can be found here.  

To make your visit to the Palanga Summer Reading Room even more convenient, we invite you to use the sensory map. 

Palanga has long been one of the most popular resort towns in Lithuania. In 1965, Vaclovas Jurgaitis, director of the National Library, came up with the idea of building a large summer reading room in Palanga to ensure that vacationers had sufficient cultural activities. That same year, Palanga’s chief architect, Albinas Čepys, took on the project. 

The Palanga Summer Reading room, designed by Čepys, finally opened in June 1966 and remains in operation to this day. The large, elegant building, constructed from glass and wood with an oak tree inside whose branches pierce the roof, blended perfectly into the landscape. Inside, visitors could find about 6,000 books and nearly 200 titles of newspapers and magazines in various languages. The reading room immediately attracted attention and was praised not only by Lithuanian vacationers but also by guests from various countries—it is said that there were days when, due to the large number of visitors, not everyone who wanted to enter could do so. It was considered a hub for intellectuals, artists and public figures. 

After nearly three decades, the Summer Reading Room was closed in 1991 due to the poor state of the building. Many other distinctive buildings from that era, such as Palanga’s “Šachmatinė”, the “Klumpė” café and the “Vasara” restaurant, had already been abandoned or collapsed. Fearing that the same fate might befall the Palanga Summer Reading Room, renovation work was undertaken. The renovated reading room reopened in 1994. 

In 2014, the Palanga Summer Reading Room was included in the Lithuanian Cultural Heritage Register. That same year, to mark this occasion, a wooden commemorative plaque was hung to honor the reading room’s architect, A. Čepys. In 2025, news of the reading room spread beyond Lithuania’s borders when the Lithuanian Union of Architects presented it at the Venice Architecture Biennale in the Lithuanian National Pavilion’s ‘Archi/Tree/Tecture’ project, “Tree Architecture: Transforming from Local Roots”. 

The Summer Reading Room in Palanga was constructed in 1966 using lightweight wooden and glass structures. The architect provided the timber from the Kretinga Forestry himself, and the construction work was carried out by the talented woodworker Juozas Auželis.  

The simple rectangular building’s facade is composed as a geometric abstraction and is crowned with a subtle undulating roof, which gives the building flow and dynamism, as well as a link to the Baltic Sea. This small, 100-seat reading room blends harmoniously into the resort’s surroundings of wooden villas and old oak trees.  

One of the most original solutions was to incorporate a century-old oak tree into the building itself. This makes the reading room an example of organic modernism, reflecting the architect’s belief that architecture should adapt to nature rather than the other way around. In 1979, the sculpture “Girl” by Albina Vanda Vertulienė was erected on the site. 

Author: Marija Drėmaitė