A cluster of white gabled volumes that represent a village demolished during the Holocaust make up The Lost Shtetl Jewish Museum, completed by Finnish architecture studio Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects in Lithuania.

Located in Šeduva, the museum is named after a shtetl – a Yiddish word for small towns of predominantly Ashkenazi Jews, which once existed in Eastern Europe.

It pays homage to the Šeduva shtetl, which was destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, with 664 of its inhabitants executed in the surrounding forests.

Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects has completed The Lost Shtetl Jewish Museum in Lithuanua

The director of The Lost Shtetl Jewish Museum approached Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects (LMA) to design the building following the studio's work on the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2013.

Across 4,900 square metres, the museum hosts exhibition areas, a library, an events space and a cafe, housed within a series of abstract white "houses".

These volumes match the scale of the surrounding farmhouses, aiming to memorialise the former settlement.

It represents a village demolished by the Nazis during the Holocaust

"The core concept was to recreate a destroyed village – a shtetl – as a kind of dreamscape that would serve not only as a museum but also as a memorial to Holocaust victims," LMA co-founder Rainer Mahlamäki told Dezeen.

"The building is located in the countryside and takes its modest scale from local farmhouses. The museum is surrounded by a new, lush park, just as farmhouses in the middle of fields are surrounded by trees," he added.

It is made up of a cluster of white gabled forms. Photo by Aiste Rakauskaite

The entrance to The Lost Shtetl Jewish Museum sits alongside a memorial wall, where a wooden grid is filled with handblown glass blocks bearing the names of all 294 shtetls that existed in Lithuania before world war two.

Inside, each of the individual volumes is connected by short corridors. The ground floor of the museum contains a library, educational spaces and multipurpose areas organised around a reception, with steep roof pitches and skylights overhead.

A memorial wall is composed of a wooden grid filled with hand-blown glass blocks. Photo by Aiste Rakauskaite

Above, administration areas have been inserted into the upper level of the largest central volume, while the main exhibition areas sit on a lower level.

These lower-level rooms tell the story of life both in the Šeduva shtetl and other shtetls in Eastern Europe. A narrow, canyon-like space tells the story of the Holocaust, ending in a stone memorial wall carved with the names of victims from the Šeduva shtetl.

The exhibition route culminates in a tall white space named the Canyon of Hope, which frames the surrounding countryside through a full-height glazed opening.

Public spaces are finished with a "warm" and "tranquil" palette of oak and pale quartzite stone. LMA described this as a deliberate departure from "the pathos and roughness of materials characteristic of many monuments".

The museum contains exhibition areas, a library, an events space and a cafe

Externally, the gabled volumes are clad in scale-like panels of white, slightly textured aluminium, with window shutters and entrance reveals finished in timber to echo the surrounding farmhouses.

"The materials are simple: metal, wood, and stone," explained Mahlamäki. "The colour scheme of the facade is light but chameleon-like: the light aluminium resembles grey farmhouses and, when viewed from a distance, blends into the sky in all weather conditions."

The exhibition route culminates in a tall white space. Photo by Andrew Lee

The landscape surrounding The Lost Shtetl Jewish Museum has been turned into a memorial park, which includes a birch alley, flower meadows, wetlands and an orchard, connected by a winding path and dotted with a series of larch shelters.

Other museums in Lithuania recently featured on Dezeen include the Science Island Museum in Kaunas by Australian practice SMAR Architecture Studio, which is topped with a large, tilted aluminium disc, and Studio Libeskind's MO Museum, which is punctured by skylights and stairways.

The photography is by Kuvatoimisto Kuvio unless stated otherwise.