Legduras Summer School

Supporting Heritage

Summer school where conceptual reflection meets hands-on practice

RISEBA Faculty of Architecture and Design / Latvian Academy of Arts Summer School Lēdurga, Latvia | August 10–15, 2026 Partners: RISEBA FAD + LAA

A 5-day intensive summer school for architecture and art students, taking place on the site of the historic Lēdurga pub. The façade and courtyard of the building will be transformed into a conceptual and reflective workspace, where participants will develop both critical thinking and practical construction skills under the guidance of diverse creative professionals.

Aim of the Summer School

How can we foster respect for and interest in historical heritage? How can we simultaneously plan its use for contemporary needs while addressing urgent spatial challenges? Where lies a healthy threshold between meaningful transformation and careful preservation?

Through these questions, the summer school aims to expand students’ conceptual and critical thinking in the context of heritage, while directly experiencing the materialisation of their decisions through the collective construction of a structural object — a stone buttress.

Format of the Summer School

This 5-day, on-site programme brings together students, tutors, architects, and artists in Lēdurga’s historic pub setting. The structure unfolds across three parallel tracks — Conceptual Reflection, Hands-on Construction, and Design — with continuous overlap between thinking and making.

Responding to the building’s critical condition, participants will design and construct stone buttresses using locally sourced stoned, learning traditional techniques while addressing real structural challenges.

This intervention becomes both a practical act and a conceptual inquiry: how to build within heritage, how to transform without erasing, and how to define value through action.

Through collective design decisions, the buttress will gain a distinct identity. Sketching, modelling, and building become tools to translate ideas into form — working at full scale, in real time.

Register by sending an email to: [email protected]