Alberta Street 12, Riga

Apartment building, Alberta Street 12

This building was owned by Pēkšēns, but Laube helped to design it while still a student of architecture. This is an enormously powerful building with a very expressive silhouette. There are several pronounced projections, bay windows, balconies, loggia, pediments, a corner tower and massive entrance portals. Some of the design is reminiscent of the architecture of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, but the overall appearance of the building is clearly that of National Romanticism. The ornamental reliefs which were masterfully included in the façade present stylised motifs of flora and fauna – pine needles, pine cones and squirrels. The windows of several apartments were made of stained glass representing exotic plants. The effective stairwell has ornamental ceiling paintings which were restored in the early 1970s. Pēkšēns’ apartment and workshop was on the first floor of the building until 1907, and a memorial apartment dedicated to the painter Janis Rozentāls and the writer Rūdolfs Blaumanis is on the fifth floor, complete with an artist’s workshop in the attic of the structure. Rozentāls, who was the most distinguished Latvian artist during the period of Art Nouveau lived and worked here from 1904 until 1915. The workshop is an authentic representation of his era.
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