- Yury Felten
Yury Matveyevich Felten ( _ru. Ю́рий Матве́евич Фе́льтен, German name Georg Friedrich Veldten) (1730 — 1801) was a court
architect toCatherine the Great , Empress ofRussia .Yuri Felten was born Georg Veldten, into a family of German immigrants in Russia. His father worked for the
Russian Academy of Sciences . Young Yuri Felten studied on a Russian State scholarship at the Gymnasium of the Academy of Sciences.In 1744, after the death of his father, Felten moved to Germany. From 1744 to 1749 he studied at Tubingen University, but his financial and personal situation prompted him to move back to St. Petersburg. Felten wrote a letter to Empress
Catherine the Great , and she extended her hospitality and scholarship, so he completed studies at the Russian Academy, graduating in 1752 as an architect.From 1752 to 1762 Felten worked as assistant for architect
Bartolomeo Rastrelli during the construction of theWinter Palace and other buildings inSt. Petersburg . During the 1760s and 1770s he designed the complex ensemble of thePalace Square , now partially incorporated into the current buildings of theGeneral Staff . At the same time, he designed the wing of the Hermitage building on the waterfront, and worked on the winter garden on the roof of theOld Hermitage , as well as extended the museum galleries..
Felten was also a reputable inventor and engineer. He built a heavy-lifting machine that moved the enormous granite rock that was the pedestal of
the Bronze Horseman .Fact|date=November 2007 To this day the pedestal is the largest stone ever moved by man.From 1764 Felten taught architecture at the
Imperial Academy of Arts . In 1789, he was appointed the Director of the Imperial Academy of Arts, a position he kept for the rest of his life.It may be argued that his best-known work is not a building but an iron-cast grille of the
Summer Garden (1783).External links
* [http://eng.tzar.ru/history/architect/felten Veldten's Biography] en icon
*http://www.shabolovka.ru/history/names/79name.php From "A Hundred of Great Architects" by D.K.Samin] ru icon
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