Architects

Bernhards Bīlenšteins

August 21, 1877, Dobele – April 14, 1959, Heilbronn, Germany

Bielenstein, Bernhard (21 August 1877, Dobele–14 April 1959, Heilbronn, Germany) – an architect. His father was a well-known Baltic-German pastor August Bielenstein (1826–1907), a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an honorary doctor of the University of Königsberg, a renowned researcher of the Latvian language, ethnography and historical geography. Bernhard Bielenstein graduated from RPI in 1904. Then he studied a year at the Charlottenburg Technical University in Germany, and in 1905 he set up his own architectural practice. He also worked as an appraiser of the Riga Mortgage Society. More than 30 multi-storey residential and public buildings were built in Riga to his designs. Some of the earlier buildings he designed (e.g. at Tērbatas iela 6/8, 1908) display features of Latvian National Romanticism, however, his favorite stylistic variety for the most part of his career was Perpendicular Art Nouveau. 

 

A huge building on the corner of the quarter in the manner of Perpendicular Art Nouveau. Its rich decorative and ornamental finish can be perceived solely in close-up: the majority of sculptural reliefs fill in the spandrels of the bay windows between the floors. Thus, decorative elements accentuate an architectonic shape and merge with it.