Auguste de Montferrand
Auguste de Montferrand came to Saint Petersburg as a young man and devoted forty years to St Isaac’s Cathedral. He also raised the Alexander Column, a granite monolith on Palace Square and one of the great engineering feats of its time.
Henri Louis Auguste Ricard de Montferrand was born in 1786 in Chaillot near Paris. He studied architecture in Paris and worked as a draughtsman for architects such as Charles Percier, and he served as a soldier under Napoleon. In 1816 he travelled to Saint Petersburg with an album of drawings, which he presented to Tsar Alexander I. He was given a post on the committee that directed building in the capital.
As early as 1818 the young and relatively inexperienced Montferrand was commissioned to design the new St Isaac’s Cathedral. His plans were criticised, but he kept the commission, and construction continued until 1858. He solved great technical problems: founding the building on marshy ground, raising granite monolithic columns and building a dome with a cast-iron frame. He also raised the Alexander Column on Palace Square in 1832–1834, a 25-metre monolith that stands without anchoring, held by its own weight alone. He also designed interiors in the Winter Palace and houses for the nobility.
Montferrand died in Saint Petersburg in 1858, a month after St Isaac’s Cathedral was consecrated. He wished to be buried in the church, but because he was a Catholic his coffin was only carried around it before being sent to Paris. His works still shape the centre of Saint Petersburg and are among the most important of late Russian neoclassicism. St Isaac’s Cathedral and the Alexander Column show how architecture and engineering were united to express the power of the tsarist empire.