Elizabetes iela 10b

Mikhail Eisenstein was a road engineer for the Governorate of Livonia who designed apartment houses on the side, and between 1901 and 1906 that sideline produced the most extravagant façades in northern Europe. Elizabetes iela 10b is the one everybody photographs: two colossal female heads, mouths open, flank the central bay above the entrance, and the wall below dissolves into masks, foliate panels and a hard blue-and-white colour scheme. The composition was worked up from published patterns by the Leipzig architects G. Wünschmann and H. Kozel; the sources are Parisian and Viennese, filtered through Saint Petersburg. Behind the front the building is an ordinary speculative tenement, conservative in plan — the ornament is applied, not structural, and Latvian scholarship has always been careful to say that Eisenstein's houses are not typical of Riga's Art Nouveau but its loudest extreme. They sit inside the historic centre inscribed by UNESCO in 1997.