VEF Culture Palace is one of the most fascinating event venues in Riga, built in 1960 as a cultural centre, the building excels at performing its original functions up to this day, preserving historical values and pursuing new, modern creative forms of cultural and artistic expression in the meantime.
Historical significance of the VEF Culture Palace is closely tied with the State Electrotechnical Factory, or VEF, one of the enterprises that used to spearhead production and innovation in Latvia at the peak of its rise. The abbreviation VEF, retained in the name of the Culture Palace, is a part of historical legacy of this prominent enterprise.
Nowadays, aside from being a popular tourist attraction, the VEF Culture Palace primarily acts as one of the most essential cultural centres of citywide and national importance – a modern environment for discovering the history of culture, highly valuable artistic self-expression, creative initiative and implementation of innovative ideas.
Values in an Elegant Form the motto and slogan of the VEF Culture Palace, embracing and accentuating fundamental traditions and modern qualities, the unified synthesis of capabilities and creativity.
The Palace offers splendid premises for holding high-class cultural events, maintains a high-quality environment for creative activities, conduces and promotes the occurrence of creative initiatives, diversity and uninterrupted intensity of the city’s cultural life. The VEF Culture Palace is always open for new initiatives, creative experiments and incarnation of traditions in unprecedented formats.
The range of events of the VEF Culture Palace is geared towards quality, diversity, association and interaction between traditions and innovations, preservation of the unique nature of Latvian culture in a multicultural environment and the accentuation and cognition of cultural values of other nations. In order to achieve the goals set in the domain of culture, different means appropriate to each specific situation are used: concerts, performances, exhibitions, musical shows, seminars, conferences, festivals, events of informational, educational or entertaining nature, experimental projects, excursions, etc.
For public events, the VEF Culture Palace uses a grand auditorium with a balcony (capacity – 802 stationary seats, 8 additional seats and wheelchair spaces), a chamber hall (capacity – 250 seats), a mirror hall (capacity – 100 seats), a balcony lounge, an exhibition / banquet hall, 3 seminar rooms, a VIP conference room, café and premises of the VEF History Museum, as well as the premises of the information centre with a ticket office and two large cloakrooms.
In terms of convenience, the Palace can be proud of its especially advantageous location, with immediate access to various commuter transport and parking spaces, as well as a hotel, a supermarket and a number of cafés and restaurants just a 5 minute walk away.