Reconstructed houses on Ķīpsala Island
Gaile’s home on Ķīpsala
INTERVIEW / December
The Žanis Lipke Memorial,
also called the ‘Black Shed’
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/ airBaltic.com
here – while your child is very young and you build
your dream home in Piņķi (an outer suburb of Riga –
Ed.), everything’s all right. But when the child starts
going to preschool, school, after-school activities,
various sports, then you end up sitting in traffic jams.
You can work in the IT industry or at Bloomberg
or whatever and earn five thousand euros a month,
but you also want your children to have a good
education. And that’s why people return to the city.
There are 500 empty residential homes in Riga right
now. There’s a whole movement called Occupy Me,
in which young people go and inhabit them. But it’s
much more expensive to restore an old, five-storey
rental building than it is to buy land out in the coun-
tryside and build your own house.
‘We’ve all begun in the same place – searching
for shelter from the wind and cold.’ That’s what
you wrote in your study about rural farmsteads
throughout Europe. What do our ancient domiciles
say about us?
Whenever I travel, I go to museums to see their tra-
ditional houses, because they can tell you a lot about
a nation’s character and spirit. If people are chased
into apartment blocks or high-rises, they lose their
natural reference points. In the Soviet era, Latvia’s
tragedy was that people were chased out of their
traditional farmsteads and into villages; their land
was taken away from them, and they no longer had
anything to do in the evenings. All that remained
was TV and alcohol. People cease to be adults in
conditions like that; they lose their ability to think
independently and their will to work.
Nowadays, too – in these times of globalisation –
there’s always someone who wants to be be smarter.
Look, here on the table I’ve got The Battle for
Home: Memoir of a Syrian Architect by Syrian ar-
chitect Marwa Al-Sabouni. She’s appeared on TEDx.
In the book she explains how big of a role the chang-
ing face of architecture has in human conflicts. For
example, when the architecture in a traditional
environment becomes more modern, it divides soci-
ety. And now, when rebuilding destroyed cities, she
urges us to not repeat these mistakes. Modernism
has become very aggressive. If you remove a Syrian
from his house-based daily rhythm and box him into
a room in a large apartment building, it leads to idle-
ness, and that’s the beginning of the end...
The farmsteads that the Latvians built reflected
their view of the world. The idea was to position
the buildings on a slight hill and orient them along
the sun’s path, to do everything possible to make it
a place for a good life. They took into consideration
the direction of the prevailing winds and the
local moisture patterns; they even set out a pot
to determine what kinds of ants would come –
black or red. And it was the same with peoples all
around the world. People in the past were more
similar to animals – they had senses. We’ve now
forgotten much of that knowledge. We’re not so
perceptive anymore.
Marc Cain Store Riga | Lacpleša iela 20a | Marc Cain Store Riga | t/c Spice
www.marc-cain.com