The capital of Latvia, Riga, has one of the most profusely built neighborhoods in the modernist style. Known in that and other parts of the planet and at that time as art nouveau or Jugendstil, this decorative, imaginative and colorful architectural style was the hallmark of the city, and continues to be.
In the mid-19th century, Riga was the third city in Russia, after Moscow and Saint Petersburg. Between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, the city grew through the Central Riga neighborhood, with wide avenues and apartment blocks competing to see which exhibited the most beauty.
Entering the 20th century, the city saw the birth of cafes, salons and a vibrant intellectual life. Upon becoming an independent country from the Russian Empire in 1918, art nouveau architecture flourished, giving rise to one of the neighborhoods in the world with the highest density of this architectural style.
The citizens of Riga answer, laughing, just as a Barcelonan would in the Eixample neighborhood, if you ask them where to find the famous art nouveau architecture. They answer: “Look up.” More than 750 buildings in Riga house this style, especially concentrated in the neighborhood adjacent to the medieval old town.
Among all these buildings, the name of Mikhail Eisenstein (father of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein) stands out, author of numerous works throughout the country, but only twenty in Riga. Almost all of them are concentrated on Alberta iela Street, and are considered masterpieces of this architectural style. Its facades compete with each other in decorative richness and natural and mythological motifs.
The most prolific Latvian architect was, without a doubt, Konstantins Peksens, who designed more than 250 buildings in the city alone. The art nouveau museum, in the heart of the modernist neighborhood, is located in the building where he lived, and which was designed by him. Its façade is full of ornamental motifs about the local flora and fauna, also used in the interior design.
The visitor can walk around recreating the interior of an art nouveau apartment from the 1920s, with its living rooms, furniture, lamps, clocks, kitchen utensils and kitchenware... The living-dining room shines with its stained glass windows and the iron oven in the kitchen still works. .
The first floor of the museum – which is accessed by a spectacular spiral staircase with geometric motifs – offers a large amount of multimedia material that allows a better understanding of this architectural style present throughout the neighborhood.
It is a good starting point before starting to walk down the street to admire all the facades, each with its ornamental motifs, moldings, doors and windows specifically created for the occasion. By the way, at the entrance to the museum, for statistical reasons, they ask the visitor's origin. When you answer that you are from Barcelona, their faces light up, they say: “Oh, Gaudí!”, and they give you a brochure in Catalan.
The area between Alberta iela and Elizabetes iela streets is the one with the most decorated residential buildings. High facades with geometric motifs, or mythological scenes from ancient Greece, muses playing the lyre while the satyr watches them, turrets, flower garlands... architecture at the service of the applied arts.
Leaving those perpendicular streets of the city's expansion, you reach another area rich in modernism, where the facades fight to be seen in narrower streets. There is the cat house, with the façade decorated with these felines, and other buildings where the walker can admire caryatids or masks of melancholic women in the upper frame of the entrance door.
The buildings of the National Opera and the Italian embassy stand out, with a pantheon on the façade of Greek figures holding the iron scrolls of the balcony above with their necks. Atlas holding the world on his shoulders completes the set.
To rest from so many kilometers walked between facades and symmetries, the visitor can stop for a coffee at Chez Olivier, a cafeteria that can be entered by walking under a large Jugendstil-style stone tree.
The tourist guides offer routes to admire the main modernist buildings of the city, although knowing which are the main areas, it is best to simply walk and let yourself be carried away by the fantasy and creativity of the architects.
