We started planning our towns in the Middle Ages, when some kind of commercial bustle started around the church buildings. Cēsis, Kuldīga, Talsi, Liepāja and Jelgava are the oldest towns where architecture and archaeology students go for their field practice. Till the early 1900's most Latvians lived in rural areas, in farmsteads; towns were the place where German merchants lived, as well as Latvians who had left the countryside and had no land of their own. The previous turn of the century was the time when land ownership relations changed and many Latvians who were left landless moved to the city ― to Riga or to Jelgava. ― To live and to work! ― was the new catch phrase. That's why there was a boom in the business of tenement house and factory building.

The city of Riga started to flourish when the fortification wall was torn down in 1856. It was a wonderful takeoff moment not only for German-born but also for the first professionally educated Latvian architects. A period of focused city planning ensued. The first academically schooled Latvian architect Jānis Fridrihs Baumanis centred the project of the new town around the historical part of the city, creating a circle of boulevards ― more than 60 dwelling-houses and the most important of public buildings, the Latvian Association building, the base of the national awakening movement, among them. Wilhelm Neumann, a Baltic German, was the author of the town planning of Daugavpils, an important city on the route of the St.Petersburg-Warsaw-Berlin railway line.

The Riga Central Market is the pride of our architecture. The construction went on from 1924 to 1930 incorporating five World War I zeppelin hangars. There is no market place quite like ours in any other city of the world! Between the two world wars we built many school buildings designed by Pauls Kundziņš, a distinguished architect.

The second busiest period of town planning started after World War II. Huge industrial enterprises were built in all the largest cities as dictated by the Soviet ideology. Workers for the plants were shipped in from other republics of the USSR, and these people were housed in freshly built building estates. These are excellent teaching aids for students of architecture to learn the way cities and human environment should never be planned. Mostly these were five-storey buildings with tiny ― cubby-hole ― flats and auxiliary premises of minimal space. But then again, these same dwelling-houses are the reason our architects are now earning acclaim for adding individuality to these faceless housing estates.

The tendencies of international modernism revealed their cloven hoof in projects of schools, town centres and dwelling-houses. Supermarkets, schools and tenement houses with the same layout and very similar furnishings were being built all over the country. Still, we got away lightly from this architectural nightmare. We're done with uniform architecture now!