How Riga Became Europe s Art Nouveau Capital

At the dawn of the 20th century Riga moved on from its past and initiated a design revolution that consumed its streets. This is Riga, Latvia, possessing the highest concentration of Arnavo buildings in the world. It's known because of that as the Arnavo metropolis. Arnavo wasn't a single unified idea, it was a fluid volatile style that split into three distinct ideological types. Permanently frozen onto the facades of the city we can still see Arnavo today in over a third of the buildings in the city centre. Join me as we explore the three distinct styles that make up Latvian Arnavo. Every architectural movement has a first building and in the case of Riga this is it. It's a building by young architects Alfred Asenkamp and Max Lewinsky. It's 1903 and it's a radical step out for architecture in this city. At the latter part of the 19th century parts of Europe had grown tired of looking backwards. A design revolution exploded simultaneously across borders and under different names. Jugendstil, Secession, Modernista, Steel Liberty and all of these were components of the overarching style Arnavo. In Riga Baltic German architects Alfred Asenkamp and Max Lewinsky wanted something alive. In typical 19th century buildings windows were just repeating rigid boxes. Asenkamp and Lewinsky kept the basic rectangular shapes but subtly curved the upper corners morphing them into organic archways. The tree's roots anchor at the lowest pillars and its branches sweep up to embrace the windows. In Arnavo the apple tree is a powerful symbol of life, growth and the rebirth of a city shedding its past. The buildings essentially are quite traditional, quite box-like and it's really the application of this extraordinary skin of ornament and decoration. That's how they wanted to typify Latvia at this point in time. An innovative progressive city growing rapidly and they chose this style of Arnavo ornament which is peculiar to them to actually express that. This building features the raw authentic roots of what was to be known in Latvia as Jugendstil, youth style. By the time Michael Eisenstein, an engineer with an obsessive flair for drama builds Elisabeth 10b the decoration becomes the building. It was theatrical, emotional and unapologetic. Facades became vertical stages for grand allegorical dramas. The structural pillars are shaped like stylized human forms and the lines create an intense rhythmic movement across the stone. To look at Elisabeth 10b is to quintessentially understand Riga's Arnavo architecture. It became pure unadulterated theatre. This building stands as the absolute zenith of the eclectic decorative movement. It's a masterpiece not because it follows the rules of architecture but because it radically rewrites them. At first glance the building seems perfectly symmetrical. First two floors are rendered while blue brick surfaces on the upper floors make a wonderful background for stucco decorations and sculpture. Crowning the absolute pinnacle of the roof line are two colossal elongated female caryatid-like figures rising two floors high above the main centrepiece, making one ruminate about the meaning and essence of life. Their faces are eerily calm, smooth and rational, staring out into the horizon like ancient sentinels. The calm female sentinels represent the powerful rational mind while the screaming faces mirror the demonic chaotic forces tearing at the edges of the world. It was a haunting predictive mirror of a collapsing Russian empire. Mikhail Eisenstein didn't just design facades, he wrote a sprawling stone carved opera across the skyline of Riga and there is a street in Riga in which they all come together in harmony, Alberta Street. This short elegant stretch of road was built in a frantic building boom, transforming the urban landscape. Here at number eight, Eisenstein treats the facade as a massive canvas of vibrant glazed blue bricks and stark white plaster. The entire centrepiece is dominated by a majestic projecting structural column which is designed to look like a massive tree trunk growing straight out of the pavement. At its absolute peak sits a roaring lion's head, the ultimate honour of a projection of metropolitan strength, protective vigilance and soaring mercantile wealth. Flanking the windows are serene female masks symbolising beauty, while the frames themselves are guarded by carved monsters and terrifying beasts explicitly engineered to keep the inhabitants safe from the chaotic world outside. At Alberta Street number four your eyes are fixated to the second floor because the centrepiece of the building is a massive elegant elliptical window flanked by a stone balustrade balcony. Directly above it the windows morph radically again, shifting into three striking keyhole shaped openings that serve as a brilliant signature of earlier 20th century avant-garde design. Crowning the central attic above the projecting corners are three haunting heads of Medusa, mouths frozen wide in a permanent scream. Eisenstein used these mythical terrifying gorgons as psychological mirrors. They represent raw human subconscious anxiety, chaos and the inner psychological demons threatening the structured civilised world. The side projections are dramatically topped by stone lion figures looking over the street. The lower portions of the facade and the framing around the entrance feature stylised winged monsters and dragon-like reliefs. By carving them flat into the decorative skin of the portal Eisenstein used them as protective talismans, magical guardians meant to absorb or ward off evil spirits and bad fortune before they could cross the physical threshold of the home. Alberta Street 2A completed in 1906 was the final act of Eisenstein's eclectic career. Guarding the entrance are two mythical stone sphinxes that jut out onto the sidewalk as physical protectors of the property. Eisenstein was sending a clear public message. The wealthy residents inside the building are shielded by spiritual wisdom and unbreakable security. Eisenstein treated this facade with a heavy dose of theatrical illusion and mystical symbolism. Standing directly on either side of the main entryway are two large dramatic sculptures. They traditionally symbolise purification and victory. One of the most brilliant architectural tricks on the street is here on the top of the building. It features a decorative false floor. The window apertures are completely hollow meaning that there's no roof behind them allowing passers-by to see the actual sky and passing clouds shifting through the facade. While most of Rieger's Honnevaux buildings are uniform plaster, Eisenstein broke up the facade by weaving in bands of glazed ceramic tile adding a rich striking colour contrast to the sculptural elements. The upper and lower sections of the building are heavily punctuated with expressive dramatic stone faces, macaroons, screaming figures. Walking along Alberta Street you get the sense of being in an operatic masterpiece. So while many of the buildings have wonderful decorative facades, when you come inside the great themes, the decorative themes, carry through into the foyers. They tend not then to go up into the private apartments themselves so what we're dealing with here is a public decorative language facade and foyer and that pattern is repeated in many buildings in the city. There are a number of large-scale apartment blocks which typify Eisenstein's approach and as you can see from in here the language in the foyer is very similar to the language outside on the facades. Look up into these grand spaces. The ceilings are wrapped in incredibly lavish multi-stage stucco mouldings and plasterwork. Eisenstein echoed the psychological depth of his facades in his interiors. The plaster births with winding bands of stylized vines, garlands and hidden decorative masks. These ceiling reliefs were deliberately designed to interact with the grand chandeliers of the era, casting dancing theatrical shadows across the rooms when night fell over the city. But the true architectural spine of an Eisenstein interior is the stairwell. It turns a simple ascent into an apartment, into a spiritual sensory experience. The cold iron and heavy metal completely dissolve into fluid whipping waves and organic plant-like tendrils. Eisenstein's interiors prove that Arnavut was never just about decorating a flat wall. It was a Gestankenswerk. So there we have it, Michael Eisenstein, the great decorator, the leader of eclectic Arnavut, which led so much of the Arnavut impetus in this city. As we look at these buildings they have a sense of opera, they have a sense of performance and stage art, and we have to say that a hundred years on these buildings are still singing. But this explosive theatrical energy wasn't just confined to the quiet boulevards of the new territory. To see how this vivid decorative style successfully invaded and conquered the cramped, tightly wound medieval heart of old Riga, you just have to look at Calaisjoux Street 23. Designed by the prolific architect Paul Mandelstams, this building is widely celebrated as the most artistically elegant example of eclectic decorative Arnavut in the entire old town. Mandelstams traded Eisenstein's terrifying roaring monsters for a stunning colourful celebration of natural life, splashing the facade in vibrant terracotta, turquoise and yellow tones. Look at the central masterpiece of the building, the majestic corner bay window. It's completely encircled by a lush sculpted canopy of blooming chestnut leaves and flowers, and gleaming right at the centre of that canopy is a radiant gilded sun emblem. Repeating in variations across Riga, the sun was the ultimate Arnavut symbol for the flowering of life and metropolitan renewal. It stands as a dazzling crescendo to Riga's obsession with pure facade decoration. But a city can't live on borrowed theatre forever. The architects Peschkins and Lorba carved out something entirely different and authentic in their approach to building. Their architecture was an open act of rebellion. Up until this moment the city was trapped in a grid of rigid predictable symmetry. But look how this building moves, it behaves less like a traditional wall and more like a rugged jagged mountain ridge slicing into the sky. And the architects have completely abandoned the old flat playbook. They push the footprint outward utilising a massive dramatic asymmetry. This was national romanticism. On one side the building anchor drops into a soaring multi-storey bay window, on the other the entire structure culminates in a staggering heavy corner tower that mimics the defensive turrets of ancient Baltic fortresses. Doors and window frames were frequently tapered inward at the top mimicking medieval wooden construction techniques. The roofline itself breaks out into steep aggressive triangular gables designed to mirror the sharp pitching canopies of the northern pine forest. But the true genius is in the texture. The facades feature unpolished granite, coarse plaster, dark wood and limestone to evoke the rustic texture of traditional Latvian farmsteads and countryside. Where you would traditionally expect to see Roman columns or Greek gods, the architects for this building carved out something entirely authentic. And it's this exact outer defiance that sets the stage for the architectural miracle waiting just inside the front door. Here we are in the most beautiful, the most exquisite stairwell in the entire Baltic region. And as we look at it we realize that a generation of young architects in Riga were achieving their idea of Art Nouveau through the national romantic spirit. And they did that not simply through clever engineering and beautiful spatial flow. They were also interested in what was on the walls in the language of Latvian symbolism, the national romantic spirit that they expressed through a range of their mythology and through their natural life. This breathtaking spiral staircase winds upward with dizzying geometric precision. Wrapped in highly geometric heavy oak and balustrades, the staircase behaves like a living twisted sculpture carving through the heart of the building. The architects completely abandon the fluid circular whiplash loops of foreign Art Nouveau. The spectacular hand-painted frescoes covering the plaster are a pure celebration of local flora. Far from mere decoration, Peskins and Lorber chose these botanical and ethnographic motifs to serve as spiritual guardians of the space. The chestnut leaves symbolize noble strength, endurance and protective energy, warning off misfortune as visitors climb the staircase. The daisies and meadow flora are dedicated to Mara, the Baltic goddess of the earth and daily life. They invoke fertility, health and peace within the home. The winding vines represented infinite growth, life force and the interconnectedness of human spirit with the natural world. The integrated geometric symbols woven into the vines were a traditional Baltic sign of Sola, goddess of the sun, representing warmth and enlightenment, and Osiklis, a deity of the morning star, represented by an eight-pointed star. This wasn't just the stairwell. It was a magnificent architectural laboratory where Latvians carved out their independence in stone and paint, swinging away from the empires of the past and pointing decisively towards the future. In Baltic cultural traditions, the daisy represents innocence, youth and untouched natural beauty. By covering a salon ceiling in daisies, they were celebrating the resilient, quiet beauty of the local northern landscape. Here, the architecture shifts its botanical language from daisies to trees. Look at the upper walls and the central rhombus-shaped ceiling rosette, heavily adorned with stylized chestnut leaf motifs that bring the canopies of Riga's parks directly indoors. The most opulent room in the house is this space. Unlike the wall frescoes in the stairwell, which celebrate local native Baltic flora, the stained glass in the building features exotic plants, stylized palms, water lilies and iris blossoms. During the turn of the 20th century, greenhouses, winter gardens and exotic flora were symbols of refined taste and a flair of international Art Nouveau. As with much Art Nouveau architecture across Europe, nature is at the same time local and international. The fierce cultural pride of national romanticism quickly moved from private apartment blocks into the public sphere. Local architects realized that if you want to break free from imperial rule, you have to change the environment where young minds are shaped. Peschkins and Loeber didn't just build walls here, they bound a school to the literal mythology of the nation. Even the window frames are deliberately cut with sharp beveled angles, a direct rustic nod to the ancient architecture of rural Latvian farmsteads. As we step inside the main entrance, the stairs and balustrades are defined by a powerful grounded geometry and clean honest lines crafted from native materials. Every step upward feels structural, unyielding and deliberate. The walls are accented with clean geometric bands and stenciled ethnographic symbols, with repeating folk patterns that acted as a silent cultural curriculum. But the spiritual heart of national romanticism was about to claim an even higher ground. This magnificent Church of the Cross, completed in 1909 by the legendary master of the movement, Egon's Loeber, alongside architect Wilhelm Boxlaff, is a revelation. For centuries churches in Latvia were built to reflect the German Gothic or Russian Orthodox power, but Loeber shattered that tradition. Just look at the exterior. It looks like a monumental heavy stone citadel, straight out of a Baltic fairy tale. Loeber used rough hewn, heavily textured local granite and dark timber to mimic the ancient pagan defensive fortresses that once guarded these northern forests. The windows are narrow, defensive and deeply recessed, while the roof lines mimic the sharp steep angles of traditional Latvian barns. Then we step through the heavy wooden doors and the sacred space opens up into a temple of pure national folklore. Now what this church does for me more than anything else is pull together the different elements of Latvian Art Nouveau and integrates them together in what we might call a Gestankenswerk, a pulling together of all of the arts. Instead of traditional European gold leaf or heavy velvet, you're surrounded by vast pure white plaster walls and light open spaces. Look up at the roof structure. The entire congregation is sheltered under a grand exposed timber ceiling frame, crafted entirely from dark stained native pine. These immense wooden beams look down upon rows of simple unadorned wooden pews. Follow the central aisle to the altar, which serves as the emotional and spiritual focal point of the interior. The altarpiece completely bypasses ornate foreign sculptures, choosing instead a clean architectural geometry, accented with traditional Latvian folk signs. Flanking the sanctuary are the spectacular sweeping wooden galleries, elevated seating decks supported by tapered timber pillars. Even the light inside is profoundly local. The windows are narrow and high, casting sharp focused shafts of cool northern daylight across the stone floors. It symbolizes so much about what a young generation of Latvian architects were trying to do. They were trying to develop a style for their nation and for their capital city and developing those elements and components which would express the idea of what it was to be a Latvian in a progressive international context. What we would also say about this beautiful building is that it's perhaps a definitive expression of the national romantic spirit in Latvian art nouveau. The movement naturally shed its rustic folkloric details. It had evolved into its final most sophisticated phase. Architects realized that a booming fast-paced 20th century metropolis didn't need folklore. It needed efficiency, it needed geometry and above all it needed light. They built the literal aesthetic launchpad for the modern high-rise. Instead of cluttering facades with statues or rustic folklore, facades were designed with strong sweeping vertical lines that draw your eyes right up into the sky, giving shorter four or five story blocks the towering soaring feel of early American skyscrapers. So as the style formulates itself in Riga in the early 1900s, we notice as we get to 1904, 5, 6 that distinct phases and distinct stylistic tendencies develop and one of these has become known as the perpendicular and as you can see perpendicular is what it says. It tends to be a more geometric, a more structured and a more vertical approach to the art nouveau style and in many ways the perpendicular anticipates the modernisms which are yet to come. Over the course of just 15 explosive years, Riga did something unmatched in architectural history. Roads turned into brilliant colourful street theatres, energy turned inward with the rise of national romanticism as architects carved native folklore into school lobbies, apartment staircases and sacred church walls to make the whole nation into a fortress and a city expressing itself through the soaring geometric lines of the perpendicular style, achieving a prophetic leap straight into the modern world. Then in the summer of 1914, the scaffolding came down, the money vanished and the world went to war. The grand laboratory of Baltic modernism came to a sudden and permanent halt. But what remains on these streets today is more than just a collection of beautiful buildings. It's a perfectly preserved time capsule of an era when human hands carve their deepest hopes, political rebellions and cultural dreams directly into the stone skin of the city. There is a reason why this city has been nicknamed the Art Nouveau Metropolis. There are up to 1,000 buildings by local calculations in the Art Nouveau style and that thing that's pulling it all together is an approach to what it is to be a Latvian. The imagery, the symbolism and the attitude of the buildings is about what it is to be alive in Latvia in an age of progress.