The Academy of Sciences is Riga's Stalinist skyscraper, completed in 1961 after a decade of construction, and built to the same template as the Moscow towers it was meant to echo: a tiered mass stepping inward as it rises, heavy with ornament, crowned with a spire.
Locals call it Stalin's birthday cake. It stands in the old suburb across the railway from the centre, and from its observation deck the whole argument of the city is visible at once — the Hanseatic spires of the old town on one side, the Soviet districts on the other.