Augustine's Garden: Care as a Spatial Practice in Grīziņkalns

A Courtyard That Wore Its History Plainly

The compound at Alauksta iela 7, 7a, and 7b in Riga's Grīziņkalns district is not a building with a single origin story. The dominant structure — a five-storey National Romantic tenement built in 1911 by Latvian architect Aleksandrs Vanags — establishes the street edge with its warm ceramic brick and the decorative register of a turn-of-the-century civic ambition. Behind it, wrapping the courtyard, are the later additions: Soviet-era wings built in white silicate block, functionally competent and architecturally indifferent, installed when the compound required expansion and the city required housing. The result is a site defined by two very different material consciousnesses, pressed together around a shared courtyard, and left to coexist without mediation for decades.

This is the ground Sampling inherited. The Brussels- and Riga-based studio, founded by Manten Devriendt and Liene Jākobsone, works across residential, cultural, and public programmes from offices in both cities. Their practice has developed a consistent position on the question of existing fabric: that the existing is not a problem to be overcome but a condition to be read, and that the architect's task is to find the minimum intervention required to unlock the potential already latent in the site. For client Hanzas nami, they converted the compound into sixteen residential units — studio duplexes and larger apartments with terraces and French balconies — distributed across the three addresses, without displacing or concealing what was already there.

Minimum New Material, Maximum Consequence

The project's title is borrowed from Saint Augustine — a reference not to religious programme but to the idea of the garden as a cultivated place of care, a space tended rather than controlled. This distinction carries weight in how Sampling approached the physical work. The 830-square-metre courtyard is not remade; it is repaired. The two brick skins — Vanags's warm ceramic and the Soviet silicate — are left intact and visible, treated as the primary surface of the project rather than as a substrate to be plastered over or painted into uniformity. The palimpsest is not concealed but presented: this is a building that has been more than one thing, and this project does not ask you to forget it.

What Sampling proposes is not a renovation but a calibration — the precise minimum of new material required to make the existing compound legible as a place worth inhabiting.

The new elements are few and precise. Steel canopies shelter each entrance from the weather without enclosing the threshold. Suspended steel light fittings mark the courtyard's volume without filling it. Steel tree surrounds define planting positions without competing with the ground plane. Concrete windowsills are lowered to sit at courtyard level, opening the interior-exterior relationship between the ground-floor units and the shared space. Each addition reads as a specific response to a specific condition, and none asks for more space or attention than it earns.

A Single Red, Precisely Placed

Every steel element in Augustine's Garden is painted the same carmine red. The canopies, the light fittings, the tree surrounds — all share a single, unambiguous hue that distinguishes the new layer from the existing fabric with the clarity of a structural system. This is not decoration. It is notation. The red does not compete with the brick; it marks a different ontological register — the new within the old, legible as such without annotation. Alongside the red, blue and green metalwork accents appear at secondary positions, expanding the chromatic field while keeping the carmine as the dominant identifier of the Sampling intervention.

The logic is consistent with the care ethic the project names: you do not pretend the new is old, and you do not subordinate the old to the new. You mark the boundary between them with enough precision that both can be read on their own terms. In a city whose building stock carries multiple layers of political and architectural history, this refusal of homogenisation carries a specific weight. The compound at Grīziņkalns is shortlisted for the EUmies Awards — recognition that this kind of spatial intelligence has a European audience prepared to receive it.