The Admiralty
The building of the Admiralty occupies Second Admiralteysky Island on the bank of the Neva and is considered one of the finest examples of Russian Classicism, although it all began as an ordinary shipyard. Peter the Great personally signed the drawings, and construction began on 5 November 1704; by the start of the following year the first ships already stood on the slipways. Since the Great Northern War was underway, the shipyard was fortified with an earthen rampart with five bastions and moats filled with water, and the first ship was launched in May 1706. By 1715 about ten thousand people were working here. At the time the buildings were single-story wattle-and-daub structures in a U shape, and a canal ran around the perimeter of the yard, filled in only in 1817.
In 1709 the tsar ordered a model chamber to be set up to store drawings and models of the ships built; in 1805 it grew into the Naval Museum, which operated here until 1939. The complex's first rebuilding took place in 1711, and eight years later the Dutch master Harman van Boles installed above the gates a spire with a weathervane in the shape of a small ship — the very symbol of the city that today accompanies the Bronze Horseman and the angel of the Peter and Paul Fortress on the city's unofficial coat of arms. According to the consensus of historians, the prototype for the figure atop the spire was the Ingermanland, the tsar's favorite ship.
A stone building was erected on the site of the earlier one in 1732–1738 by Ivan Korobov, who preserved the overall layout but added monumentality and a slender tower with a gilded spire — the very one later dubbed the Admiralty Needle. The complex acquired its present appearance under Andreyan Zakharov, a student of the Parisian architect Chalgrin: from 1806 he rebuilt the building into a grand structure with a main façade 407 meters long, applied a tripartite composition, and crowned the central tower, 72 meters high, with a gilded spire bearing the old ship weathervane, carefully preserved from the earlier building. The tower is encircled by an Ionic colonnade, and the abundant sculptural decoration — a high relief depicting the birth of the fleet, allegorical figures of the celestial and earthly spheres, flying figures of Glory, and statues of ancient commanders — was created by Terebenev, Shchedrin, Pimenov, and other masters.
Sailing ships were built here until 1844, after which only the naval departmental offices remained. In 1917 the Centroflot met here, and after the October Revolution it housed the sailors' revolutionary committee. In 1932–1933 the USSR's first bureau for rocket engines, the Gas Dynamics Laboratory, worked in its buildings. Throughout the Siege the spire was hidden under a camouflage cover, removed only in the spring of 1945. Today the building is occupied by the Command of the Russian Navy, which has been based here since 2012.
