INTERVIEW / December
INTERVIEW / December
CORRECTLY
PLACING
In an interview with Baltic Outlook, world-renowned Latvian
architect Zaiga Gaile explains why she is so fond of wooden
architecture, what are the elements of a harmonious family
home, and what drives her crazy about modern hotel culture.
THE FAMILY DINING TABLE
Architect Zaiga Gaile with a model of
the New Riga Theatre reconstruction
Interview by Ina Strazdiņa
(Latvian Radio)
Publicity photos
68
/ airBaltic.com
‘Look! The big ship is turning around!’ We’ve been
immersed in the books and journals spread out on
architect Zaiga Gaile’s large family dining table,
studying her many publications, building designs,
and photographs, but now she urges us to look up.
Outside the window on this cool, foggy, grey day, we
see the side of a huge white ferry slowly and majesti-
cally turning around on the Daugava River. ‘It arrives
at eleven o’clock, and then it turns, and it’s so big
that it sometimes seems it’ll get stuck in the river,’
Gaile says.
This is the same river Gaile and her husband,
Māris Gailis, were rowing on two decades ago when
they noticed the grey, untended environment of
Ķīpsala Island with its wooden buildings and breath-
taking view of Old Riga. Now, twenty years later, the
formerly neglected left bank of the Daugava River
has become an exclusive residential area with a
complex of wooden buildings restored under the
direction of Gaile herself.
Here we also find her own family’s home, built
on an old foundation discovered in the ground.
The captain’s house with a small tower reflects a
combination of two historical archetypes: the rural
homestead and the urban-dweller’s house. The living
room is large and full of light, there are huge book
shelves, big vases, paintings, a garden, and a view of
the ever-changing river.
‘I grew up in a wooden house with no television.
We had a gas stove and heated the house with wood.
Father had a huge book shelf, a piano, paintings.
People ask me why I’m always working on those
wooden houses, but that’s the only thing I knew up
to the age of 18, and that’s what naturally comes to
my mind when I think of a home,’ says Gaile, who
is the winner of the Latvian Great Architecture
Award, several Latvian Architecture Awards, and
many other Latvian and international awards. She is
the author of several books as well as a lecturer and
guest lecturer at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in
Stockholm and at the Venice Architecture Biennale,
and often travels to give lectures in Kazan, Kiev,
Moscow, Edinburgh, and elsewhere. Her unique style
can be appreciated at Bergs Bazaar in central Riga,
numerous restored manor houses and other old
buildings throughout Latvia, and at former industrial
complexes and factories reconstructed into modern
apartments, offices, and private homes. She also de-
signed the widely acclaimed Žanis Lipke Memorial,
also called the ‘Black Shed’, under which the Latvian
dock worker Lipke hid and thus saved the lives of
about 50 Jews during the Second World War.
The exhibition Tieši laikā: Dizaina stāsti par
Latviju (Just in Time: Latvian Design Stories) is
currently on show at the Museum of Decorative Arts
and Design in Riga until January 27, and among the
highlights is Gailis and Gaile’s book Mēbeles jauni-
em cilvēkiem (Furniture for Young People), which
became a cult classic in the late 1980s for people who
longed to decorate their homes in a more personal
manner. In February 2019, the book will be on show
at the House of European History in Brussels as a
part of the exhibition Restless Youth: 70 Years of
Growing Up in Europe.
It’s beautiful to have windows like this, with a view
of the river and the ships passing by.
Yes, it really is. I went swimming this morning, too.
People put plastic windows
in houses, they turn the
houses into thermoses
Now? In this cold weather?
I swim all season long, even this late in autumn.
Does the architecture of today also wish to
wade into rivers, get lost in the forest, be closer
to nature?
We regularly attend the art and architecture bien-
nales in Venice, and they present the current trends.
There used to be bubbles and skyscrapers every-
where, until Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas started
a revolution. Now people are talking about living
together and getting along, about the environment,
about sustainability, about saving energy.
But there are a lot of myths, too, for example,
about building insulation. People put plastic windows
in houses, they use cheap materials, and they turn
the houses into thermoses, which then need to be
artificially ventilated. They require very expensive
ventilation systems that introduce air into the build-
ings and also suck it out. Such systems are expensive,
and they’re also expensive to run. Sometimes the
institution – say, a school or the residents of a build-
ing – where such a system has been installed can’t
afford to run it. The system is also loud, because not
enough money has been invested in it to make it
more quiet.
Baltic Outlook
/ 2018 / 69