Starp tipizāciju un individuālismu. Ernesta Štālberga projektētā Rīgas pilsētas blokmāja Lomonosova ielā 12
Between Typification and Individualism. The Riga Municipal Apartment Building at 12 Lomonosova Street Designed by Ernests Štālbergs

Summary/Abstract: The Riga municipal apartment building built to Ernests Štālbergs’ (1883–1958) design at 12 Lomonosova Street is a classic example of Functionalism in Latvia. It demonstrates the attempts by Riga’s social democratic municipality to deal with the housing shortage and establish a new, progressive type of apartment building in the interwar period. The Commission for Overcoming the Housing Crisis was set up in 1925 to solve the lack of housing in a systematic way. The Latvian Architects’ Society delegated Ernests Štālbergs to work in the commission. In 1927, he took part in the propaganda week for overcoming the housing crisis organised by the commission. Štālbergs engaged in disputes about the normalisation, standardisation and typification of construction, topical in Europe back then. Foreign experience, especially that of Vienna, was widely promoted during the events of the aforementioned propaganda week; Hans Kampffmeyer (1876–1932), Head of the Vienna Housing Department and promoter of the garden city movement, also appeared there. In the first municipal apartment building (architect Pāvils Dreijmanis, 1927–1929) at the prestigious address 3 Ausekļa Street, apartments were distributed not only to needy families but to the city’s clerks as well. This caused public outrage; consequently, the next three houses were purposely moved to less attractive workers’ districts, hit especially hard by the housing crisis and the spread of tuberculosis. The new apartment buildings emerged simultaneously in 1929–1930. The largest was constructed in the Grīziņkalns district at 15 Jāņa Asara Street (architect Osvalds Tīlmanis). It was part of a grand residential complex whose completion was envisioned over a longer period, nearing the Vienna examples in its utopian ambition. Two smaller houses were built in the Latgale suburb – at 2 Lomonosova Street (architect Heinz Pirang) and 12 Lomonosova Street (architect Ernests Štālbergs). Their initially planned location on the corners of one quarter also suggested a larger residential complex in the future. But the idea was not realised, as the building designed by Štālbergs had to be moved to the next quarter, on the corner of Lomonosova and Aiviekstes streets. The principles of rationalism and topical trends of the time were purposefully implemented in the construction of apartment buildings – although apartments were quite small, they had modern amenities. Architects sought unified solutions and introduced elements of typification that allowed cutting construction costs. All houses were enhanced with high-quality decorative sculpture. Štālbergs’ apartment building is among the rare interwar-period buildings with intentionally exposed brick façades. The solution chosen by the architect excellently shows his understanding of the aesthetic potential of natural materials. He also revealed the decorative possibilities of brick in the building’s end façade with a geometric, modernist paraphrase of Latvian ornament, using red brick on light plastering. Reliefs created by sculptor Kārlis Zemdega (1894–1963) were also carved directly into the brick surface. This testifies to the appreciation of this material and continuation of a regional tradition, emerging as an original, individual stance amid the flourishing international modernism. The use of brick in façades links the Lomonosova Street building to the Schillerpark housing estate (1924–1930) in Berlin by Bruno Taut (1880–1938) as well as Vienna’s residential quarters of Rabenhof (architects Heinrich Schmid, Hermann Aichinger, 1925–1929) and Quarinhof (architects Siegfried Theiss and Hans Jaksch, 1924–1925).The building’s both longitudinal façades are stylistically different and show the transformation of Štālbergs’ signature style in the late 1920s – early 30s when he actively appropriated expressive means of modern architecture, at the same time looking back on the classical architecture important for his previous creative period. The street façade’s composition is reserved, closed and conservative, oriented towards the surrounding environment. The yard façade is pronouncedly modernist and, similar to sanatoriums, the dense rhythm of balconies emphasises the building’s link to its green backyard and the actively used advantage of the sunny south side. Compositions of avant-corps most clearly exemplify the differences between façades. The street-façade protrusions are given ridged gables, thus geometrically rephrasing the traditional house archetype. The narrow stairwell avant-corps of the yard façade are emphatically modernist. The composition of these avant-corps is very similar to the Bornheimer Hang estate (1926–1930) designed by Ernst May (1886–1970) on Kettlerallee in Frankfurt am Main. The layout of the apartment building reveals parallels with German examples of the time, especially with the aforementioned buildings by Taut and May, but Štālbergs was also inspired by Taut’s book Die neue Wohnung: die Frau als Schöpferin. All apartments were fitted with well-considered kitchen furnishings designed by the architect. Ideas of the so-called Frankfurt kitchen can be spotted there, taking into account the needs of hygiene, ergonomics and rational sequence of workflows, also separating the “dirty” and “clean” phases of cooking. Štālbergs was already attracted by modernist ideas since 1927 but the apartment building built in 1930 became his first modernist project to be implemented. In line with his typical pragmatic approach, the architect has found useful elements in both architectural systems, the traditional as well as the modernist. Štālbergs’ professional maturity is evidenced by the fact that he was not a blind follower of the modernist style but searched for a way to adapt the new, progressive architectural phenomena to Latvia’s conditions, especially the craft-based construction sphere and conservative residents of the building. Here one has to appreciate the architect’s refusal to imitate building materials and his emphasis on the aesthetic possibilities of brick, not very common in the interwar-period façade finish, thus creating a paradigm in Latvia’s housing architecture. The wish to retain connections with the regional context and building traditions is typical of Northern European modernist architecture and was particularly attractive to Štālbergs. The Lomonosova Street building can be seen as a total work of art in which everything is subordinated to a unified idea, including the overall image, layout, design solutions and the architectural sculpture. Housing blocks of interwar Riga introduced the next searches for standard housing in Latvia. However, the mass building scale comparable to Vienna and Germany was only reached during the Soviet occupation, especially in the 1960s and 70s when the new standard designs were worked out by Štālbergs’ former students.

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