Context

Riga is a lovely city near the Baltic Sea, the capital of Latvia.

Locals are proud of Rigas art nouveau heritage and not without a reason. Over a third of all buildings in Riga are examples of this unique school of design and it’s worth to bring it to the light over and over again. This is what “Riga faces” project tries to do.

In architecture, a mascaron ornament is a face, usually human, sometimes frightening or chimeric whose alleged function was originally to frighten away evil spirits so that they would not enter the building.

There are so many in Riga!

Content

165 high quality images of mascarons seen on art nouveau buildings located in Riga, Latvia.

Acknowledgements

All the photos are kindly provided by Tomas Jundo, creator of www.rigafaces.com

Check out some other resources of this project:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rigas_sejas/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rigas.sejas

Inspiration

Despite small size, there are a couple of exciting ideas worth trying:

• Apply style transfer to convert given real face to "Riga face"
• Train a GAN model to create new "Riga faces" using few-shot transfer learning on existing face GANs