Admiralty

The Admiralty was the first Russian shipyard on the Baltic Sea. Originally designed by Peter the Great himself, the foundations were laid on 5 November 1704. The original project consisted of a ?-shaped single-storey block with shipyards, docks, workshops and warehouses for the storage of building materials, armaments and rigging. Admiralty College was built from stone in the centre of the building, with a tower and steeple crowned with a small ship (1711). The central block was rebuilt in brick by Ivan Korobov, retaining the original layout and external appearance (1730–38). After the Admiralty caught fire (1783), restoration work was headed by Andreyan Zakharov (1806), but interrupted by the Napoleonic invasion (1812) and only completed after the war (1814–23). The building was redesigned and decorated with statues and reliefs extolling Russian naval power sculpted by Feodosy Schedrin, Vasily Demut-Malinovsky, Stepan Pimenov and Ivan Terebenyov (1806–19).