Dubulti train station at Jürmala, Latvia: Part 2. Continuing my thoughts on train stations and arriving now to the one in Jürmala. By the time of my visit to Jürmala (meaning seashore in Latvian), the station was of the Soviet era.
Research revealed that by the turn of the 18th century the town was a fashionable beach and health resort where many Latvians, Baltic Germans, and Russians spent their holidays at the feet of the Gulf of Riga on the Baltic Sea (Image 4).
Despite its modest size, the prestige of the town grew and in 1848 was marked by “the opening of a bathhouse that was the envy of every resort town in Europe.” Within a few years, Jürmala became a famous health resort with its white sandy beaches and modern sanatoriums.
At the turn of the 19th century, steamboat traffic between Riga and Jürmala could no longer accommodate the increased number of summer holidaymakers. Thus, the completion in 1877 under the Russian Empire of a railway connection between the capital Riga and the city of Tukums to the east. Eventually, fourteen stops served the municipality of Jürmala in the early 1900s (Image 4).
Later, during the Soviet occupation of Latvia (1940 to 1991), the coastal town became a fashionable spa resort/sanatorium for workers of the socialist world. Because of its firmly rooted renown, it also served the apparatchiks (elite members of the communist party), and higher up soviet leaders—such as Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev (both premiers of the Soviet Union)—who sought-out Jürmala as a vacation spot to rival the popular Black Sea Riviera beach resorts in Crimea, Sochi, and Abkhazia.
“A summer trip to the seaside was a valued reward for millions of Soviet workers who met their production targets and spoke up for the Party; they were rewarded with a putevka, the colored voucher which was the essential currency for Soviet vacations. It covered the cost of accommodation, food and entertainment – and in some cases health treatments too. The Jürmala putevki were especially coveted.”
From Jurmala, a victim of circumstances
The city, and many of Jürmala’s precincts, became the new Riviera of the Soviet Union with wooden buildings in the national romantic style alongside art nouveau buildings. To serve the increased influx of tourists, a new Dubulti train station was built in the late 1970s and represents one of the last testaments of Soviet-era modernist architecture in the Baltic States.
Of note, in 1912 a direct line connecting Jürmala and Moscow via Riga enabled Muscovites and citizens from remote parts of the Russian Empire to travel directly to the Baltic health resorts. While additional research is necessary, I am suggesting that this direct train line to Moscow might have had something to do with the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden.
This assumption seems plausible as the Russian Empire participated at the 1912 Games. Bringing visitors directly to Riga was enhanced by the ease of a ferry connection between Riga and Stockholm, with of course a now easy way to enjoy Jürmala. Also, in 1913 the Russian Empire celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, and this new train link might have anticipated the Empire’s enhanced need to connect with the Baltic Sea.
Let us return to the Dubulti train station(s)
My research led me to discover fourteen train stations corresponding to Jürmala’s districts strung along the twelve-mile coastal municipality serving residential areas, vacation homes, and sanatoriums. The fourteen train stations were:
1. Jaunkemeri
2. Kemeri station being the most western station of Jürmala
3. Sloka
4. Vaivari station (1927) which equally served the 1970 National Rehabilitation Centre Vaivari (previously called All-Union Space Research Workers Sanatorium/Cosmonaut Sanatorium)
5. Asari station
6. Melluži station (1914)
7. Pumpuri station
8. Jaundubulti (1925)
9. Dubulti station (1919 and 1977) the closest entrance to Jürmala’s best beaches
10. Majori station
11. Dzintari station
12. Bulduristation
13. Lielupe station (1913)
14. Priedaine station (1909) as part of the city limits of Jürmala
If dates are not indicated with the train station’s name (above, and below in Image 7 and 8 indicated by red circle), research shows that they were opened in 1877, the same date as the newly constructed railway line. Of note, the sheer number of train stations along the coastal resort indicates the importance of the destination. Train stations in bold on map indicate those that are currently in use. Of possibly interest, the new station at Dubulti was constructed approximately a hundred years after the railway connection between Riga and Tukums.
The original 1899 Dubulti train station (called Dubbeln until 1919) was a two-story wooden structure; the only one of this size on the entire Riga-Tukums railway line (Image 8 top right). “The [first] station had waiting areas, a telegraph office, a train ticket office and premises for a summer restaurant, along with living quarters for the station’s employees, a luggage storage room and a news stand.” These amenities seemed luxurious for the time but let us not forget that Jürmala was a rapidly growing tourist destination that catered to many socio-economic classes, and, in particular, to those with more disposable income from Riga and the larger Russian Empire who demanded luxury, whatever it meant at that time.
Despite the increased holiday traffic to the original Dubulti train station, neglect and constant disrepair was the rule under the Soviet occupation. In 1977 a new train station was completed on the previous site, promoting a contemporary design that explored a structural-spatial beam system with a wave-like form. After a number of stylistic sanctioned movements by Josef Stalin who favored Neoclassicism and brutalist monumentality, in the late 1950s under Nikita Khrushchev, there was a revival of modernism, which became an accepted style and rejected Socialist Realism (the brutalist aesthetic that began in the 1950s). In a certain way, the Dubulti train station spoke the language of an international modernism, one that had been practiced in the West but was already passe there.
Current Dubulti train station
The architectural style of the current Dubulti train station was called Soviet, or Socialist Modernism, and favored “function over form, rigor over litheness, utilitarianism over ornamentation.” The newly designed train station was located at the site of the previous station in a privileged position on the edge of the historical city center. It also served as the closest point to the beach. Today, the train station continues to operate in addition to hosting a contemporary art gallery, thus its name Art Station Dubulti.
Designer Igor Georgievich Yavein (1903-1980), an alum of the Leningrad Institute for Civil Engineers with degrees in architecture and engineering, was not a novice when chosen to design the new train station. He was known “for his innovative approach to designing transportation facilities,” where “a railway station or a railway terminal is not a ‘house’ in the traditional sense of this word but rather a casing, a shell for the transport and pedestrian flows, a hub where people switch from one kind of conveyance to another.”
Retrospectively, my interest in Jürmala’s train station is that it represents an avant-garde architectural approach. Yavein’s first project represented a constructivist influence where dynamic flowing forms, rhythmic motion, asymmetrical volumetric composition, and structural expression represented a “new organic architecture,” according to Alexander Vesnin, leader, with his brother, of Constructivist architecture. As Yavein progressed in his professional career, during the 1960s he became more daring and personal in his design. The Dubulti train station marks a long research in form and structure and was one of his last built projects.
The train station—as well as the National Rehabilitation Centre Vaivari in Jürmala (Image 13 center)—promoted a style that was radically different from those vernacular structures found in the town. These new structures were certainly born as a form of state propaganda, one which now embraced a return to modernist aesthetics. Building on the credo of modernity, optimism and belief in how architecture could transform society, the new Dubulti train station was far more elegant than anything seen before in Jürmala. The overarching message used through architecture was one of progress in its ability to mesmerize for the many (mostly the Soviet worker on vacation at the beach resort), through an architecture that was unique given the typical aesthetic landscape of Soviet era Khrushchecvka housing (apartment blocks named after Khrushchev). (Image 13 left).
Some remarkable features of the train station
I discovered two iterations that carry similar themes to the 1977 station. In these (Image 14, 1-6), there is a clear articulation between the front (public) and the more administrative functions. In the first example (vertical images to the left), the public space is expressed by a curved spatial enclosure which we now know will become the entrance sequence, versus a rectilinear organization at the rear that houses administrative offices and support spaces (i.e., bathroom). A large canopy-like roof held by pilotis (columnar structure) gives unity to the overall composition of the train station.
The second iteration lends the entrance of the first iteration a volumetric quality that will end up been teased out to become the iconic built form; a sculptural concrete shell defining the entire entrance sequence. Constructed of reinforced concrete, this is the iconic feature of the building. The shell structure is formed by four ribs that cover an open-air main entrance. The expression of the ribs starts with the entrance and fades away over the ticket office. A very beautiful detail that allow lightness along the cantilever on either side of the exterior ribs.
While enamored with its current iconic form, discussions with an engineer revealed to me that Yavein favored a more expressionist solution to the form of the structure, rather than pushing static principles to a new limit. Many details are correct, and at times common sense static principles are circumvented to favor the formal and grand gesture.
Entrances
There are two ways to approach the station; one that is major and the other minor. The one that I consider as primary because it faces the parking lot, is the one that provides a staircase under the cantilevered canopy leading passengers to the covered outside waiting room and inside ticket booth (Image 11).
My rationale is pragmatic. Many public buildings were designed in a temple-like style with a number of steps rising symmetrically to follow the overall composition of the building. These steps provided movement from the pedestrian sidewalk to an elevated entrance from which one had access to the public interior spaces. This formal entrance sequence typically included a freestanding even number of columns forming a colonnade that created a portico. At the Dubulti train station, earlier colonnades used in classical buildings were stripped of any established ordering system (base, shaft, capital) and in this new building were now slanted and part of the overall sculptural structure (Image 11, left).
Here, the reminiscence of a visual academic tradition is superbly interpreted. Yavein’s sensitivity enabled him to update a classical procession, yet now one’s journey culminates in a different public covered outside space where seating organizes the area into waiting zones. This sequence of movement is interpreted by using contemporary materials, an arch structural system in a wave-like shape reminiscent of the nearby beach and the Gulf of Riga.
The second two entrances, which seem more majestic than the first one but do not participate in a classical procession through a portico, give direct access under the crescent shape of the wave; and this directly from the street and from the train tracks. All three contribute to shaping the urban plaza that is sheltered underneath the wave structure.
Conclusion
Researching content for this blog and comparing and contrasting my on-site experience has once again given me the opportunity to take a subject matter as a pretext to not only analyze it but expand into urban, cultural, and site strategies that give more meaning to the object under scrutiny. It has become clear for me that the current train station at Dubulti, is heir to a lineage dating back more than a century and is part of a larger territorial infrastructure that began with an extension to the city of Riga and ended up reaching Moscow.
Postscript
As the Baltic States are forging stronger ties with the rest of Europe, I learned of the planned Rail Baltica high-speed project spanning between Tallin (Estonia), Riga (Latvia), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Warsaw (Poland). Ironically during my research, I found a rendering for the design of a local train station in Järvakandi, Lithuania which is very reminiscent of the one presented in this blog. A reinvented post-Soviet design for the 21st century!
Also, during my visit to Jürmala, the curator of the Art Station mentioned to me that a nearby statue of Lenin had been removed shortly after the opening of the Dubulti train station in 1977. While this might be anecdotal, it is interesting that opposite the train station on what is now a desolate plinth of haphazard stone pavement, stood a statue of Lenin in what is called Dubulti Square.
The monument was “the largest [statue] in the Baltic states and the third largest in the USSR.” I understand that Leonid Brezhnev, who served at that time as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—and who was elected that same year as first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party—had visited Jürmala. Perhaps a matter of circumstance, like in many occupied countries under the Soviet Union, the demolition of monuments to Lenin began shortly before the collapse of the USSR, and continued after Latvian independence in 1991.