Riga to Host Its First Open House Architecture Festival
The architecture festival Open House Riga takes place for the first time on 10 and 11 October, with forty buildings in its programme. Organisers describe it as a manifestation of the wish to bring architects together.
The first Open House Riga architecture festival will take place in the Latvian capital this weekend, on 10 and 11 October. Visitors will be able to see the city and its architecture from a new perspective and enter buildings that are often closed to the public. The event is part of Open House Worldwide, an international urban and architecture initiative that began in London in 1992 and now covers more than sixty cities on six continents. In the Baltics, similar festivals have been held for several years in Vilnius and Tallinn; this year Riga has joined them.
Who is behind it
The festival is organised by architects Kārlis Jaunromāns, founder of the platform Tandeems, and Olga Trebuhina, head of the association Reuse Atelier, together with art historian and communications specialist Veronika Viļuma. Jaunromāns believes Latvia's architecture scene is fragmented and closed, and calls the festival a manifestation of the desire to unite. The organisers want architects to cooperate with one another.
More than eighty volunteers helped prepare the festival, including architects, students, schoolchildren, guides, researchers and people simply interested in architecture. Researchers worked in archives, libraries and the Latvian Museum of Architecture, and the material they gathered became the stories told on the tours. This also creates a broader knowledge archive about Riga's architecture.
The programme
The programme includes forty buildings: private houses, offices, industrial heritage, educational institutions and cultural buildings, both historic and new. Among them are two finalists of this year's Latvian Architecture Award, the TZMO office building and logistics centre, and the Zuzeum art museum. Tour places filled up fastest for the Čiekurkalns water tower, the House of the Roosters and the Wagner House.
The organisers also want to draw attention to buildings from the Soviet period, such as the former Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party building at 2 Elizabetes Street. They argue that existing buildings are a city resource and that in many cases it is more sensible to reuse them than to demolish and build anew.
Plans for the future
Next year the organisers hope to include one hundred buildings in the programme and attract five thousand visitors. They also want to draw foreign guests more purposefully and develop Riga as an architecture tourism destination. More information is available at Openhouseriga.com and Openhouseworldwide.org.
