Architecture

Museum of Old Petersburg

The Museum of Old Petersburg was an example of the attempts of the World of Art to resurrect the forgotten art of the eighteenth century. In spring 1907, Alexander Benois founded a Commission for the...

River Neva

Foreign visitors to St Petersburg were always struck by the beauty of the River Neva, particularly at full tide. A busy transport artery, the river often burst its banks, causing havoc in the city. I...

Decorative Institute

The Decorative Institute was founded on the basis of the Petrograd Theatrical Design Studios in January 1920. Besides such practical activities as decorating parades and facades on Communist holidays...

Gardner Factory

The history of porcelain production in Russia began with the foundation of the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg in 1744. The Imperial Porcelain Factory was the third factory in Europe to p...

Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood

The Church of the Resurrection of Christ was built in 1907 on the bank of the Catherine Canal in St Petersburg, where Tsar Alexander II had been fatally wounded in 1881. The building was popularly kn...

Polovtsov Dacha on Stone Island

Ivan Fomin built the dacha between 1909 and 1913 for the diplomat Alexander Polovtsov, son of the famous statesman of Tsar Alexander III. The building is one of the finest examples of the Neoclassica...

Prince Abamelik-Lazarev Mansion

Prince Sergei Abamelik-Lazarev’s mansion was actually a complex of buildings erected between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yevgraf Vorotilov designed the wing on 21 River Moika Embank...

Polovtsov Mansion

In 1835, Prince Sergei Gagarin commissioned Alexander Pähl to redesign the facades of the Polovtsov Mansion in the late Neoclassical style. The rusticated ground floor, window frames with cornices an...

St Michael’s Castle

The strange and eclectic style of St Michael’s Castle so aptly reflects the principles, artistic tastes and philosophical views of Paul I that it is often referred to as an “architectural self-portra...

Ligovka

Ligovka is the popular name for one of the most notorious districts of St Petersburg – a haunt of debauchees, thieves, prostitutes and other social outcasts. Many post-revolutionary artists depicted ...

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