Riga carries the densest concentration of Art Nouveau in Europe — about a third of the buildings in the city centre, most of them raised between 1904 and 1914. On Alberta iela, Mikhail Eisenstein took an ordinary apartment block and argued the whole case on the street elevation: pale lime plaster, white stucco relief, colossal female heads flanking the central bay, and fields of blue glazed brick set hard against the white.

This system reads that elevation flat and frontally. Strict vertical bays, a symmetrical axis, rectangular openings punched into a plane — then ornament that escalates as it climbs toward the cornice. Curves live in the ironwork and the stucco tendrils, never in the structure.