RIGAStalinist & Soviet Architecture  ·  1935–2014

Riga carries its twentieth century in public. The Freedom Monument of 1935 stands a short walk from the Stalinist tower of the Academy of Sciences, and both are a short walk from two museums built specifically to record what the occupations did.

That density is what makes the city unusual for this subject. Elsewhere the Soviet period has been pushed to the outskirts; here the argument is conducted in the centre, building by building, and the newest entry in it — Gunnar Birkerts's National Library, finished in 2014 — was designed as a deliberate answer to the Stalinist skyline it faces across the river.