Mikhail Eisenstein was a civil engineer, not a trained architect. Born into a Jewish merchant family in Bila Tserkva, he qualified in Saint Petersburg in 1893, moved to Riga, and rose to head the road department of the Governorate of Livonia while designing tenement houses on the side. Between 1901 and 1906 that sideline produced the most photographed façades in the Baltic: some twenty buildings, clustered on and around Alberta iela, in a form of Art Nouveau so lavish that it reads as an argument with its neighbours. Sphinxes, masks, griffins, peacocks and colossal female heads are hung on conventional, even conservative, tenement plans. He drew on French and Viennese sources and on pattern books; his son Sergei Eisenstein became the Soviet film director. He left Riga in 1917 and died in Berlin.
