Aleksandra Fledžinskaitė-Kašubienė (Kasuba) left a rich artistic legacy which includes early textile works, tile panels, mosaics, paintings, collages, works in public spaces in the United States, models and drawings of never realised dwellings and unique spatial environments – such as “elastic” habitats. In her creative practice, A. Kasuba engaged in an intriguing dialogue between architecture and nature, reflecting on the mechanisms of spatial construction and striving to create alternative architectural habitats in opposition to the strict geometry of buildings. This sense of space developed consistently in her professional path, influenced by personal experiences and the changes in her living spaces.

Born to a family of intellectual aristocrats, A. Kasuba grew up in Ginkūnai Manor, Lithuania, where she had the opportunity to study and learn languages. After the Soviets nationalised their home estate in 1940, her family moved to Kaunas, and A. Kasuba was left alone in Šiauliai to finish high school. Although most of her works were concerned with experiments in the formation of space, A. Kasuba was not an architecture graduate. Her studies of ceramics at the Art Institute in Kaunas from 1941 to 1942, and sculpture at the Art Academy in Vilnius in 1943, were constantly interrupted by the Nazi and Soviet occupations, which forced her to flee to the West together with her husband, Lithuanian sculptor Vytautas Kasuba (1915–1997). The sensitive situation of leaving her homeland and the lack of privacy in the displaced persons camp in Munich (1946–1947) inevitably influenced her practice. For the rest of her career she developed the idea of architecture as a harmonious shelter, and explored how the physical environment could contribute to the well-being of its inhabitants.

After moving to the United States in 1947, A. Kasuba introduced herself to the United States’ art scene with her painted ceramic tiles and mosaics, and participated in artisan exhibitions. This start led to numerous commissions for monumental decorative works for public squares, as well as building interiors and exteriors. Her signature mosaics, graceful relief walls of undulating brick, optically moved the facade of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx (1973) and the wall of 7 World Trade Center (1986), which was destroyed during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

A. Kasuba’s first experiments with the structures of stretchy fabrics were carried out by cutting up her husband’s shirt and stretching it over a frame. Eventually, the nylon fabric originally developed for thermal clothing became her main tool for creating unconventional environments. The artist worked with the rigidity of tensioned membranes and sculpturally shaped spaces without prior architectural plans, avoiding right angles and striving for easily disassembled, organic forms. She drew inspiration from pre-industrial construction and natural motifs such as plant pods, shells and underwater creatures. By subverting the concept of the traditional building, A. Kasuba created sensory-enhancing spatial circumstances that included additional stimulants such as lights, mirrors, smells, textures and sounds. Her consistently developed vision of sustainable architecture as a social instrument was mostly implemented only as installations in museums. The one exception was her own house (and two adjacent studio-residences for guests), which she built in the New Mexico desert between 2001 and 2005.