JURIS VASILJEVS AND RIGA: SUBJECTIVELY SELECTED SKETCHES (Juris Vasiljevs un Riga: subjektivi atlasitas skices)

The architect and architecture historian Juris Vasiljevs (1928-1993) stands out as one of the most prominent explorers and champions of Riga architectural heritage what was the key subject of his enthusiastic research and teaching practice. Vasiljevs' daughter, architect Helena Dekante reiterates her father's creative biography from his first arrival in Riga at the age of 16 in 1944 to his last articles in the early 1990s. Illustrated by extensive quotations from Vasiljevs' Riga-related publications and the author's own memory episodes, these 'subjectively selected sketches' vividly recreate the life-long relationship of the scholar to his city as a story of particular love, professional concern and devotion. Living in Old Riga, Juris could not accept the violent post-war deconstruction of the damaged buildings, and at his graduation from the Faculty of Architecture of the Latvian University in 1951, he dared to plan the destroyed steeple of the St. Peter's Church as reconstructed in his graduation project of the Republican Library. The dissertation on Neoclassicism in Riga architecture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries (1955) was followed by a comprehensive monograph on the same subject (1961, in Russian) that remains the basic treatise about this period in the architecture of Latvia. The work on the guide 'Riga. Architectural Monuments' (1971, in Russian) was an opportunity to pay particular attention to Old Riga, 'the unique, magnificent pearl of the Baltics', as he praised it in the introduction. Vasiljevs co-authored the album 'The Dom Cathedral Architectural Ensemble in Riga' (Leningrad, 1981, German, Spanish, French and English editions) and contributed to several dictionaries. In the 1980s his special concern was the Latvian section of the reference guide to Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the series 'Artistic Heritage of the USSR' (1986, In Russian). Vasiljevs' last studies showed a growing scholarly interest in figural reliefs as meaningful memorial marks in the transition period from the late medieval Riga to that of the modem times.