Sunday, April 16, 2017

Art Nouveau Riga

Rīga is famous for being a world center of Art Nouveau (also known as Jugendstil) architecture and design. The tourist information brochures claim that there are 800 buildings in this turn-of-the-last-century style. I assume by this that they mean 800 buildings that are considered to be officially of historical importance because my own sense is that there are far, far more than 800 of them. It seems that Rīga enjoyed a boom in the early twentieth century and pretty much adopted Art Nouveau, which was very much in vogue at the time, as the municipal style for apartments, retail businesses, you name it. The buildings that I snapped photos of here are nothing special, by which I mean that they are pretty standard, ordinary buildings. Trust me, there are far, far fancier buildings. These are sort of run of the mill. You should see the ones where the architects decided to get busy and really jazz up the façades. It is also notable that all of them were within three blocks of my hotel. Art Nouveau styling is everywhere here, and you can see tourists gawking up at buildings everywhere, thinking, "What could have possibly inspired that particular gewgaw at the roofline?"

Here's a typical apartment building. I would enjoy living in something like this. The open balcony at the top had a couple drinking their morning kafija when I walked by: 


Here are a couple more. I like how the buildings sort of talk to each other in the streetscape. Every one of them is saying to its neighbors, "Hey, look at me. No, look at me." Click on the photos and check out all the funky detail.The corner buildings are in particular a delight because they often have fanciful towers wrapping around the corner, as it does here.



Some sensitive building owners have seen fit to light their buildings up at night in order to highlight all the detailing, such as with this beauty. And as you can see, the Art Nouveau folks were totally into the Baltic little balcony design motif that I have already referenced.


Rīga is fun to walk around because there are just blocks and blocks of these highly ornamented buildings in the so-called Art Nouveau district. Some of them need work; all that ornamental plasterwork must be difficult to maintain, and finding the master craftsmen who can restore it can't be that easy any more. If I am correct, it is not carved stone. Generally, the buildings are brick underneath, and the ornament is a façade that's been hung on the structure, which means it doesn't last as long as stone would. That said, Rīga is well aware that it has a treasure trove of this architectural style in its built environment, and it has done a creditable job of preserving it. 

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