Nikolay Lvov

Who was Nikolay Lvov?

Nikolay Aleksandrovich Lvov was a Russian artist of the Age of Enlightenment. Lvov, an amateur of Rurikid lineage, was a polymath who contributed to geology, history, graphic arts and poetry, but is known primarily as an architect and ethnographer, compiler of the first significant collection of Russian folk songs.

Lvov's architecture represented the second, "strict" generation of neoclassicism stylistically close to Giacomo Quarenghi. Lvov worked in Saint Petersburg but his best works survived in the countryside, especially his native Tver Governorate. He redesigned the external appearance of Peter and Paul Fortress and created an unprecedented Trinity Church combining a Roman rotunda with one-of-a-kind pyramidal bell tower. He adapted rammed earth technology to the environment of Northern Russia and used it in his extant Priory Palace in Gatchina; Lvov's construction school, established in 1797, trained over 800 craftsmen. He managed geological surveys and published a treatise on the coals from Donets Basin and Moscow Basin. He experimented with coal pyrolysis, proposed new uses for coal tar and sulphur, and wrote a reference book on heating and ventilation.