Tom Rossiter and Sarah Corbitt are hard acts to follow. Bravo to them! My mileage ticket brought me into Berlin a few days early and kept me in Germany a few extra days. Before the conference, I decided to visit Riga, Latvia, a wonderful small old European city filled with the sound of the Russian, Latvian, German and English languages. Plus there's some great jugendstil work (in my next post) and the new library by Gunnar Birkerts. I was there for 24 hours and the sun shined for maybe an hour. For the most part my goal in photography is recording, so my pictures may not be as good as you would like, but I hope you get the messages. The library by the way was in the later stages of construction and is probably open by now. Notice the construction sign listing all the big multinational corporations, and then the architect. And notice the last sign, really and truly right next to the library. These kinds of juxtapositions are part of the joy of Riga. Many of the buildings in the old city look like stone, but look carefully and you discover that they are wood.
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Mike Mense FAIA
Owner
mmenseArchitects
Anchorage AK
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