evolution of saint petersburg -- 4/7/2026

07 Apr 2026

evolution of saint petersburg -- 4/7/2026

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Today's selection -- from The Design of Cities by Edmund N. Bacon. The design of the city of Saint Petersburg:

“Saint Petersburg (now Leningrad) in Russia is one of the few great cities built in its entirety after Renaissance design ideas had reached their full maturity. Its planners had available to them the experience of a broad range of completed civic works.'

“When Peter the Great decided he was tired of Moscow and wanted to create an entirely new capital for Russia, and in 1712 announced it would be on the banks of the Neva River, Paris had already achieved a dynamic scale.

“In contrast to Paris, where the design forces burst outward from the old city, in Saint Petersburg the lines of force thrust inward from the regional countryside. Their convergence was at the one point of attraction which adequately symbolizes the underlying concept of the new city, the point of contact of man and the sea, the shipbuilding ways enclosed within the arms of the Admiralty. The convergence of these three lines of movement, the evolution of which is demonstrated on these pages, determined the form of the major elements of Saint Petersburg and provided a powerful framework for the subtle and highly refined design to be carried out later.

“In 1725 the design tension has already been established between architectural elements on both sides of the river, appropriate for a maritime settlement. The pull from the hinterland is expressed in the yellow line, the first thrust of the single road from the east direct to the tower on the moated Admiralty. This building is the focal point in space, which, though completely rebuilt in subsequent years, retained its pre-eminence as the symbolic center of the city. The road from the southwest is foreseen as an idea, and the axial way does not exist.

Saint Petersburg, 1744

“By 1750 the plans have begun to take on the character of a city. Streets have been built, and the three converging ways are firmly established, although their thrust has not yet fully extended, in a design sense, to their objective, the Admiralty tower. The Winter Palace, later to be rebuilt, appears to the right. The multiple design interrelationships at this point have not yet been resolved.

“In 1800 the three converging roads have been carried through to a definite junction with the still-moated Admiralty, but the spaces created are accidental and unintegrated as a total concept. The small church below the Admiralty later will be replaced by the Saint Isaac Cathedral, related in a design sense with the westernmost of the converging streets. On the banks of the Neva to the east, the Winter Palace has been rebuilt to its present form. Here, too, the residual open spaces are undefined, but contain within them the germ of the idea which was to be so powerfully expressed later. The crosshatch structure on the point which splits the river channel had been built to express architecturally the idea of the terrain. The next generation replaced it with a building perpendicular to the architectural mass behind it. As shown in the 1850 plan, this building asserted its design influence directly into the water by the curved bulkhead on its axis.

“1850 [saw] … the full realization of the whole series of design influences which had been building up over the previous hundred years into one of the most dynamic compositions ever made. Here we see the Admiralty rebuilt in a form reminiscent of the older building (see page 196) but on a much more powerful scale and in better relationship to the force of the axial thrusts. The original and the present elevations of the Admiralty are shown at the same scale, for comparison, on page 198. The Winter Palace axis has been extended southward by the great column which marks the focal center of the remarkable parabolic-shaped space defined by the Ministry of War, forged out of the old structures. The thrust of the space before the Admiralty is contained and turned back on itself by the enclosure of the area around the column. This provides a firm counterfoil for the elongated extension of the space west of the Admiralty, beyond the Cathedral of Saint Isaac, into the depths of the city.

“The interaction of the cross-movements of this highly dynamic and extraordinarily shaped space with the extreme formality created by the symmetrical convergence of the three axes meeting at the Admiralty tower is one of the wonders of urban design."