The Butas cooperative house is an interwar apartment building at Trakų Street 5 in Kaunas, Lithuania. It was built in 1932, and the project page identifies Jonas Kriščiukaitis as its architect. The page also lists the building’s recognition as a European Heritage Label site.2
In interwar Kaunas, people from the same profession sometimes formed cooperatives to build housing. The page describes Butas as one of the first apartment-building cooperatives in the city, established by senior officials of Lithuania’s Supreme Tribunal. Its members could live in the building and carry out professional work there: apartment layouts allowed residents to meet clients without disrupting family life.2 A separate source describes it as a five-storey building with nine apartments and notes that lawyers’ offices had separate bathrooms and access from hallways.10
The project page names Supreme Tribunal officials Liudas Ciplijauskas and Martynas Kavolis as the cooperative’s organisers. It also identifies several residents: architect Jonas Kriščiukaitis, his brother Kazys, and Antanas Kriščiukaitis (Aišbė), a writer, researcher and first chairman of the Supreme Tribunal. Liudas Ciplijauskas, a lawyer and public figure, was another notable resident.2
The building used reinforced-concrete construction, then a relatively new method in Lithuanian housing, and its minimalist, modern forms stood out in Kaunas at the time. The project-page article was published on January 31, 2019; that is the publication date, not the building’s construction date.2