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Rang

Art Nouveau in pastel

Riga

A Baltic capital with hundreds of Art Nouveau buildings, their fronts in blue, cream and yellow with sculpted faces.

View of Riga from St. Peter's church, Latvia
Photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Why Riga is art nouveau blue

Riga, the capital of Latvia, grew very fast around 1900, just when the Art Nouveau style was in fashion. As a result it has one of the largest collections of Art Nouveau buildings in the world, several hundred in the central districts. The most famous are on Alberta Street, where apartment houses are covered in sculpted faces, flowers, peacocks and sphinxes. Their stucco fronts are painted in pale blue, cream, yellow and pink, with white details. The older medieval town has its own colours, including the House of the Blackheads, a guild hall of red brick rebuilt in the 1990s. The historic centre has been a World Heritage Site since 1997.

Art Nouveau blue#6F9EC9Cream stucco#EFE6CFFacade yellow#E9C96BFacade rose#D99A9ABrick red#A6452F

Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.

About this page

Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Riga" on Wikipedia. If you know Riga and we have it wrong, tell us.

More colour cities

All colour cities
🇮🇳 The Blue CityJodhpurOld-city houses washed in blue crowd the foot of Mehrangarh Fort, on the edge of the Thar Desert.🇮🇳 Town of mud-resist block printBagruA small town near Jaipur where the Chhipa community prints cotton by hand in indigo, black and red.🇮🇳 Prayer flags over a high desertLehStrings of five-coloured prayer flags and white stupas stand out against the brown mountains of Ladakh.🇵🇰 City of saints and blue tilesMultanBrick shrines of Sufi saints are banded with blue, turquoise and white tiles, a craft still alive in the city.🇰🇷 Busan's pastel hillsideGamcheonA steep neighbourhood of small box-like houses painted in pastels, turned into an art village in 2009.🇲🇦 The Blue PearlChefchaouenA mountain town in northern Morocco whose lanes, steps and doors are washed in many shades of blue.

Photo credits on this page

The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.

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