The architectural heritage of Latvia presents multiple layers of European history and the various political conditions in the region, including the shifting dominances of German, Polish, Swedish, and Russian cultures. The rural cultural landscapes still show traces of older farmsteads and estates, including the lands, buildings and their remains around the (mainly 18th- and 19th-century) manors  of the (largely Baltic-German) nobility. The urban landscapes typically exhibit a fusion of architectural approaches and urban planning inside and around the historic centres of the cities. Riga, Latvia’s capital, is rich in the architectural styles from various periods, ranging from medieval Romanesque, Northern Gothic, Northern Renaissance and baroque to Classicism and a great variety of Eclecticism buildings. The city’s historic centre was inscribed into the UNESCO World Heritage List (1997).  

A particularly elaborate architectural style flourished between 1898 and 1914: Art Nouveau. Its boom coincided with the city’s rapid economical, industrial, commercial and cultural development. Around 1905, largely influenced by trends in Germany and Austria, Art Nouveau became Riga’s prevailing style, pioneered by Baltic-German architects such as Alfred Aschenkampf, Heinrich Scheel, Friedrich Scheffel, and Wilhelm Neumann. The Russian civil engineer Mihail Ejzenštejn was the architect of some of the most outstanding eclectically decorative Art Nouveau buildings in Riga. Among the contributors were also ethnic Latvians, like the prolific builder Jānis Alksnis and architect Konstantīns Pēkšēns.

National Romanticism or Nordic National Romanticism, also known in Latvian as “the Nordic style” or “the Finnish style”, was considered an Art Nouveau variant in earlier architectural-historical literature. Nowadays, it is regarded as a distinct style which gained prominence during the late Art Nouveau period and reached its peak between 1905 and 1911. However, the distinction cannot be strictly defined, and instances of synthesis and overlaps are frequently encountered. This style, which freely interpreted various historical and vernacular idiom, had spread throughout Finland in the late 19th century and gained popularity, not only in the other Scandinavian countries, but also in the Baltic region. Retrospective in form and functional in application, it reflected neo-romantic ideas and took inspiration from local nature, the nation’s ancient history, folk culture and mythology. Within this transnational stylistic current (Nordic National Romanticism was also close to the German “Homeland Traditional Style”, Heimatschutzstil), local architects sought to manifest a specific “Latvian national style”, e.g. by introducing stylized folk-art motifs, both on the facades and in the interiors. The combination of archaized or vernacular angular shapes with ornamental and lattice motifs (or with geometric Art Nouveau elements) was often used in the decoration of the buildings. A variegated effect of colours and textures was created by juxtaposing surfaces in different natural materials: limestone, granite, red brick, wood, earthenware tiles. The most prominent representatives of this architectural language in Latvia were Pēkšēns, Eižens Laube, Aleksandrs Vanags, and Augusts Malvess.

The Nordic Romantic style was applied mainly in multi-storey apartment buildings. Among public buildings, artistically significant are Riga’s Atis and Anna Ķeniņš’s Gymnasium in Riga (designed by Pēkšēns and Laube, 1905) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of the Cross (designed by Wilhelm Bockslaff and Edgar Friesendorff, 1909-10). Clear examples of this style are also the offices of the agricultural associations in Rauna (1907) and in Smiltene (1909), both designed by Malvess, as well as the water tower in Āgenskalns, Riga (designed by Bockslaff, 1910). The Riga Latvian Society building (designed by Laube and Ernests Pole, 1909-10) was also intended to be in the National Romantic style, but during its construction it was redesigned in a neoclassicist style. The Society House’s Art-Nouveau decorative panels, by the celebrated painter Janis Rozentāls, represent allegorical compositions and include Latvian pseudo-mythological figures.

The beginning of the 20th century witnessed the spread of the second Latvian National Awakening. Under imperial Russian rule, the educated members of Latvian society cultivated their national culture, including its literature, fine arts, applied arts, and architecture. In programmatic publications, Latvian national culture was marked as patriotic and modern, and different as such from the long-established “high” German culture. In 1908, following Laube’s article “Concerning Architectural Style”, the editors of the magazine Zalktis stressed the importance of architecture in the nation-building process: “An architecture which we will be able to acknowledge as an embodiment of our nation’s spirit will strengthen our common identity more than any other civic act. […] It is unthinkable to have a national culture without a distinctive architecture.”

Both among architecture professionals and in the general public, interest in vernacular architecture, as a part of the nation’s cultural history, remained strong during the country’s first independence period (1918-40). The Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia opened on the outskirts of Riga in 1924. This “Latvian Skansen” showcased vernacular buildings from all regions of the country. In 1923, the President of Latvia, Jānis Čakste, expressed the wish to create a Latvian-style hall for the accreditation of foreign envoys at Riga Castle. The artist Ansis Cīrulis (1883–1942), who had also designed the Latvian flag as well as postage stamps and banknotes, obtained the commission; between 1926 and 1932 he carried out a very detailed figural and ornamental project. (The interior of the Ambassadors Accreditation Hall is included into Latvia’s Cultural Canon.) Later, the interior of the Riga Castle Festival Hall was designed by Laube (1938), including ceiling murals by various artists. The state curated and, with public financial support, initiated buildings symbolically asserting the nation’s identity and collective memory: the Liberty Monument (1935) and the military memorial ensemble at Riga Brethren Cemetery (1936), both designed by Kārlis Zāle.

At the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Latvia, Laube (now in a professorial role) and his colleague Pauls Kundziņš focused on the romanticized national past and historical styles as a source for inspiration, thus, to some extent, intellectually isolating themselves and their students from the currents of modern architecture in Western Europe. The “special Latvian style” was politically instrumentalized during the authoritarian regime of Kārlis Ulmanis. During this period, an agenda of the “Latvian spirit” was imposed in cultural production, requiring national particularisms, agriculturally-rooted optimism, an assertion of the nation’s culture-historical permanence, and an affirmation of the role of the state’s leader. This prompted a series of theoretical and didactic publications by Laube on Latvianness in architecture. The monumental architecture of the authoritarian period, however, was neoclassical in style (an expressive example is the Latvian Courthouse, 1938, designed by Frīdrihs Skujiņš). Invocations of Latvian folk traditions remained in evidence during the Soviet occupation regime, in the architecture of the Stalin period (1945-53), known as Socialist Classicism or Stalinist Empire style.