Alberta iela Art Nouveau District

Alberta iela (Albert Street) is in the Quiet Centre of Riga, Latvia, just north of the Old Town, and is the best-known street of the city's Art Nouveau district. Riga grew rapidly in the late 19th century as an industrial and port city, and between about 1900 and 1914 a building boom produced hundreds of apartment blocks in the Jugendstil style. More than a third of the buildings in the central area are Art Nouveau, which gives Riga one of the largest collections of this architecture in the world. This concentration is one of the reasons the Historic Centre of Riga was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1997. Alberta iela was developed in the 1900s and has a concentrated set of facades by the architect Mikhail Eisenstein, whose work is the best known in the district. Eisenstein, the father of the film director Sergei Eisenstein, designed the buildings at numbers 2, 2a, 4 and 6 in 1903 and 1906, with ornamental masks, sphinxes, female faces, peacocks and geometric patterns, painted in strong colours. Other architects, including Konstantīns Pēkšēns, Eižens Laube and Aleksandrs Vanags, also worked on nearby streets such as Elizabetes iela. The facades are covered with figurative sculpture, stucco, wrought iron and floral decoration. Most buildings remain private apartment blocks, so the main experience is walking along the street and looking up at the facades. The Riga Art Nouveau Museum at Alberta iela 12 is in a preserved apartment of the architect Konstantīns Pēkšēns and shows an interior of the period with original furniture, stained glass and decorative painting. Many facades have been restored in recent decades, particularly after the 1990s, after being neglected under Soviet rule, though some buildings still show weathering. The district is quiet and residential, with a few cafes and the Latvian Academy of Culture nearby, and it is within a short walk of the Esplanade and the Old Town.