NowSaint Petersburg

Architecture

Architecture in Saint Petersburg

Saint Petersburg was laid out at once on marshland in 1703, so its centre is a planned city of continuous façades along canals rather than a place that grew street by street. A height limit tied to the Winter Palace kept the skyline flat for two centuries, which is why the one modern tower stands far outside it.

• Lakhta Center

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  Completed 2019

  Tony Kettle

  An office tower on the Gulf of Finland, at 462 metres the tallest building in Europe. Tony Kettle, then at RMJM, turned five tapering wings around a central core so the whole shaft twists ninety degrees as it rises, narrowing the profile against the wind off the water. It stands in Lakhta, well outside the protected centre, keeping the historic skyline the height limit had preserved. The twist carries the argument that a tower here could only go where the old rules did not reach.

• Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood

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  Completed 1907

  Alfred Parland

  A church on the Griboyedov Canal, built on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. Alfred Parland raised it in a deliberately Russian idiom of onion domes and patterned brick, turned against the classical city around it as a statement of nationhood. The plan holds the exact paving where the tsar fell, enclosed and left in place under a canopy. It is the one building in the centre that refuses the European language of the rest.

• General Staff Building

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  Completed 1829

  Carlo Rossi

  The curved government block closing the south side of Palace Square. Carlo Rossi bent it in a long arc to face the Winter Palace across the square and cut a triumphal arch through its centre where Nevsky's traffic enters. The arch is set on a bend, so the palace comes into view only after passing under it. Rossi shaped the space between two buildings as the real subject, with the buildings as its walls.

• Kazan Cathedral

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  Completed 1811

  Andrei Voronikhin

  A cathedral on Nevsky Prospekt fronted by a curved colonnade. Andrei Voronikhin answered the Orthodox rule against facing a main street with the altar by turning the church sideways and reaching a great semicircle of columns out to the avenue instead. The colonnade gives the street a public square where the building's own entrance could not. It borrows the arms of St Peter's in Rome and puts them to a problem of city planning.

• Winter Palace

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  Completed 1762

  Bartolomeo Rastrelli

  The imperial residence on Palace Square, and the main building of the Hermitage today. Bartolomeo Rastrelli built it as a long Baroque block of white columns and green walls, its height fixed as the limit no building in the centre could pass. The façade repeats around all four sides, so the palace reads as a single mass rather than a front with a back. It set the horizontal scale the whole centre was later held to.