His father was Reinhold Schmaeling who was the City Architect of Riga between 1879 and 1915. The architect Alexander Schmaeling studied in Germany, at the Berlin Building Academy, and in Russia, at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg which he graduated with a degree of an architect-artist. In 1939, he moved to Germany. About 20 multi-storey masonry residential and public buildings were built in Riga to his designs. Their architecture reflected the latest trends of that time, namely, a vocabulary of forms of various stylistic varieties of Art Nouveau. The apartment house at Miera iela 5 is an excellent architectural novelty. Alexander Schmaeling had worked in the manner of Eclectically Decorative Art Nouveau and Perpendicular Art Nouveau and Latvian National Romanticism as well.