The winner of the National Design Award of Latvia 2025 in the environmental design category was the adaptation project of the technical buildings of the Tobacco Factory for the needs of the Latvian Academy of Culture. One of the project’s lead architects is Ivars Veinbergs, who, together with architect and urban planner Elīna Lībiete, has just founded a new design office, .obj. In the Nice Touch section, Ivars talks about what he does when he hits a creative dead-end.
Video games are my favorite method of productive procrastination — they simultaneously allow you to disconnect and stimulate spatial thinking, aesthetic perception and critical perspective. Along with the artifacts of the physical world, I am extremely fascinated by the experiences of virtual worlds. They allow you to reevaluate the accepted principles of materiality, form and spatial interaction. Experiencing a great video game, you can catch the same tingling in the back of your head that you feel in front of a true work of art — the harmony of light, space, sound and story can create a deep, emotional experience.
It can be a scrupulously reproduced medieval city — down to the warty turnip seller on the corner. Or a science fiction dystopia, where the progress of civilization is stuck in the depravity of brutalist architecture, spitting on regulatory acts and the laws of physics. Digital worlds offer wonderful spatial, audio and narrative experiences. Video games are here to stay — they are the synthetic cathedrals, digital symphonies, and interactive short stories of our time.
Ivars Veinbergs is an architect, designer, and, if necessary, a builder, who has just founded the design office .obj. Ivars is not only a co-author of the Tobacco Factory, the Coal House and Rīgas Cirks (Riga Circus), but also the creator of several exhibitions, theater scenographies, and album cover designs for underground bands. «.obj» has designed the exhibition A Child’s Mind, which can now be seen at the Latvian War Museum.
Viedokļi