Albert Street
Alberta iela
Interesting facts
- Between 1941 and 1944 the street changed its name four times under successive Soviet and German occupations, and its original name returned only in November 1990.
- The Soviet authorities renamed it after the young communist Fricis Gailis in 1941, while the German occupiers soon switched it to honour the Riga publisher Johann Friedrich Hartknoch.
- The entire street was built up in a burst of only about seven years, from 1901 to 1908, which explains its unusually unified look.
- All fourteen numbered buildings on the street are protected as architectural monuments.
- The painter Jānis Rozentāls lived at number 12 from 1904 to 1915; his flat and attic studio are now a museum shared with writer Rūdolfs Blaumanis.
- Pēkšēns built number 12 as his own house in 1903, and its winding spiral staircase with painted ceiling ornament is the building's showpiece, its paintings reconstructed in the early 1970s.
- The Riga Art Nouveau Museum at number 12 is the only museum in the Baltic states devoted entirely to Art Nouveau, with a fully furnished period apartment.
- The Latvian writer and essayist Zenta Mauriņa lived at number 1, the street's earliest building, completed in 1901.
- The street is still paved with cobblestones, and today its houses hold the embassies of Belgium, Ireland and Hungary.
- In the peak years of 1910 to 1913, Riga was adding some 300 to 500 new buildings a year, most of them in the Art Nouveau style.
Why it is worth it
Albert Street in Riga packs one of the most extravagant displays of Art Nouveau architecture anywhere into a single short street. Along barely 255 metres, the facades are crowded with sculpted faces, masks and ornament, all built within a few years at the start of the twentieth century. The street is named after Bishop Albert, who founded Riga in 1201, and its construction began in 1901, exactly seven centuries after the founding.
Most of the street's fame rests on Mikhail Eisenstein, a civil engineer turned architect and father of the film director Sergei Eisenstein. Between 1901 and 1906 he designed about twenty buildings in Riga, and several of his most theatrical works stand here, including the houses at numbers 2a, 4, 6, 8 and 13, decorated with an almost stage-set exuberance. Alongside them are buildings by other architects of the period: number 1 by Heinrich Scheel and Friedrich Scheffel, number 7 by Hermann Hilbig, and number 9 by Konstantīns Pēkšēns. Number 12, designed by Pēkšēns together with Eižens Laube and once Pēkšēns' own home, shows the quieter national romantic strand of Riga Art Nouveau, with motifs drawn from local folk art. Since 2009 it has housed the Riga Art Nouveau Museum. Number 2a was the childhood home of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin.
Riga itself, the capital of Latvia, has the greatest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture in the world: about one third of all buildings in the city centre belong to the style. Albert Street is not typical of that wider heritage, which is often more restrained, but it is its most concentrated showcase. Today the buildings house schools, including the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, and several embassies.
Getting there
Albert Street is in the Quiet Centre district of Riga, about 1.5 km from the heart of the Old Town. Riga International Airport (RIX) lies about 10 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Albert Street is a street in central Riga known for its Art Nouveau buildings. It was built in 1901 and named after Bishop Albert, who founded Riga in 1201.
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