We continue to be amazed by Riga’s vast cultural and architectural offerings. We spent a good chunk of today walking through the city to spot the hundreds of Jugendstil (aka Art Nouveau) buildings blanketing the town.
This style spread wildly throughout Europe at the turn of the 20th century, inspired by, among other things, Japanese wood block prints. The style is characterized by wildly curving lines, complicated intertwined floral patterns, and depictions of humans and animals in strangely distressed states. The architectural forms took on their own personality in Riga, which claims to have the biggest collection of Jugendstil buildings anywhere.
Bay windows with stunning detail
The Riga Graduate School of Law is just covered with these dramatic scenes
Helpers holding up this ornate facade
Faces filled with drama
Very unhappy woman
Embassy Row is lined with these incredible buildings
Melancholy figure looks out from above the door to the Slovenian embassy
Eery robotic guy
This house sits across the street from an old merchants’ guild house. when the owner of this place was denied entry to the guild, he topped his building with two of these cats, with their rear ends facing the guild. After an uproar and some legal wrangling, the guy turned the cats around and got into the guild.
OK, that’s just a regular cat in a window, but hey, it’s my blog