The National Library — the Castle of Light, Gaismas pils — was designed by the Latvian-born American architect Gunnar Birkerts, commissioned in 1989 as the Soviet Union was ending and not finished until 2014. Its stepped, asymmetric profile comes from a Latvian folktale about a glass mountain that rises when the nation does.
It is included here because it is impossible to read the Soviet architecture of Riga without it. The library stands on the opposite bank from the Academy of Sciences and was designed as a deliberate reply to that skyline: a monumental public building asserting a different idea of what the state is for.