Relating through Places

Marija Katrīna Dambe is a Latvian architect and co-founder of NOMAD architects based in Riga (LV). Her path into practice began with a strong focus on sustainability, resource efficiency, and the circular economy. In Latvia, these ideas encounter a particular setting: smaller-scale cities, a dispersed countryside, and a mix of underused and overlooked spaces. Rather than being obstacles, these conditions created room to experiment and to explore how architecture could build new relations between people, places, and resources.

NOMAD architects has since grown into a practice that works through sustainable building, circular processes, and collaboration with communities. Much of their work emerges from hands-on engagement, where architecture is understood less as a finished object and more as a way of relating—between people and their environment, between cycles of use and reuse, between care and responsibility.

At the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the Latvian Pavilion curated by NOMAD architects and Sampling presents the current state of defence infrastructure being developed at Latvia’s eastern border. While the pavilion reflects this reality directly, for NOMAD it also opens up questions and exploration: how such infrastructures could support communities and foster new forms of belonging in the places they shape.