Mikhail Eisenstein
Mikhail Osipovich Eisenstein (Russian: Михаил Осипович Эйзенштейн, romanized: Michail Osipovič Ejzenštein, Latvian: Mihails Eizenšteins; 17 September [O.S.
5] 1867 – 2 July 1920) was a civil engineer and architect working in Riga, the present-day capital of Latvia, when the city was part of the Russian Empire.
He was active as an architect in the city at a time of great economic expansion and consequent enlargement, which coincided with the flourishing of Art Nouveau architecture.
The archival documents from his personal file as a student at Saint-Petersburg University of Civil Engineering (1887–1893), published by professor and head of the Department of the History of Western Art of Saint Petersburg State University Roman Sokolov, Ph.D.,[1] show that Mikhail Eisenstein was born as Moisey Eisenstein into a merchant Jewish family in Bila Tserkva (Kiev Governorate, in present-day Ukraine).
The couple settled in a large apartment in central Riga and took active part in the social life of the city's upper strata.
He was interested in history and literature, and his library contained the works of Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo.
Inspiration may also have come from the Vienna Secession and the architecture of Viennese architects Otto Wagner[10] and Josef Hoffmann,[11] which display some superficial similarities with that of Eisenstein.
They are representatives of a highly, occasionally extremely, decorative form of Art Nouveau and display some innovative use of new materials such as cast iron but are conservative in their spatial layout.
[14] While Eisenstein designed buildings as early as 1897, these were in a rather typical and plain Historicist style and bear little resemblance with his later work, characterized by "exuberance and love of ornament".
The first of the buildings forming this loose ensemble is a tenement house on Elizabetes iela (Elisabeth Street) 33, built in a transitional style between Historicism and Art Nouveau in 1901.
[23] The last building of this ensemble, located on Brīvības iela 99 and built in 1905, again displays plentiful sculptural ornament and deep horizontal grooves and stringcourses.
