New Holland Arch

Spanning the narrow canal that connects the island of New Holland's inner basin, known as the "Kovsh" (the Ladle), with the Moika River is a monumental brick-and-granite arch — one of the most recognisable silhouettes of old St Petersburg. Built as part of a complex of warehouses for storing ship timber, it has long since become a symbol in its own right of this corner of the city.

The design of the arch belongs to the French architect Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe, invited to complete the finishing of the warehouse buildings originally designed by Savva Chevakinsky according to a system of vertical timber drying. The structure was built in 1779–87. Two years after construction, the military engineer Ivan Gerard revised the design, having discovered a discrepancy between the actual dimensions of the island and its canals and the original calculations of Chevakinsky and Vallin de la Mothe, and in 1783 the structure was reinforced by the engineer Matvei Vetoshnikov — owing to the outbreak of the second Russo-Turkish War, the original conception was never fully realised.

The arch stands 23 metres high, with a span of a little over 8 metres. Its facing employs a combination of red brick and granite rare in St Petersburg architecture. The structure's appearance evokes an ancient triumphal motif: massive paired three-quarter columns of the Tuscan order frame the opening, within which is set the semblance of a "Palladian window" with fragments of an entablature. The walls of the piers are decorated with semicircular niches bearing surrounds and garlands of pale stone, while the upper part of the arch is marked by a moulded band with relief decoration in limestone. Besides its decorative role, the massive structure of the arch also served a technical function — it absorbed the lateral pressure on the end walls of the warehouses, against which the drying timber was stacked.

Architectural historians consider the arch one of the most inspired structures to have survived from the era of early St Petersburg Classicism. Its reflection in the waters of the canal has become one of the city's most recognisable and frequently photographed views, and the motif of the arch set against the red-brick warehouses is regularly used in images devoted to the architecture of old St Petersburg.

In 2014 the arch was restored as part of the large-scale reconstruction of the entire New Holland complex, begun to a design by the Dutch bureau West 8. Today, illuminated after dark, the arch serves as one of the main visual landmarks at the entrance to the public park from the Moika Embankment side.

Having survived wars, centuries of neglect and a Soviet-era period as a closed naval zone, the New Holland Arch has preserved its original appearance and remains one of the most complete and expressive monuments of eighteenth-century Russian Classicism in St Petersburg.