The Horse Guards Riding Hall

The Horse Guards Riding Hall stands on St Isaac's Square, forming part of the architectural ensemble of Konnogvardeisky Boulevard in St Petersburg. The building was erected in 1804–1807 to designs by the architect Giacomo Quarenghi at an accelerated pace, as it was needed to receive the horses of the Horse Guards regiment as soon as it returned from campaigns of the Napoleonic Wars era. The riding hall was used for training horses and for ceremonial cavalry parades.

The main façade is executed in the strict forms of Classicism: eight Doric columns form a portico-loggia with a frieze and triangular pediment. The walls and columns are built of brick faced with stucco. The pediment's tympanum was once adorned with terracotta bas-reliefs by the sculptor David Jensen; in Soviet times these were removed, and the imperial eagle was replaced with a hammer and sickle. The Soviet emblem later disappeared as well, and the original decoration was never restored — the pediment has remained bare ever since.

In front of the portico stand two marble groups of youths restraining horses — reduced copies of the ancient Dioscuri statues at Rome's Quirinal Palace. Quarenghi sent the order for the figures to Italy in 1806; the sculptor Paolo Triscorni completed the work by 1810, but delivery to Kronstadt dragged on for years, finally arriving only in August 1816, and the figures were raised onto their pedestals in 1817. When St Isaac's Cathedral rose nearby, the clergy found the proximity of nude pagan deities inappropriate, and from 1844 to 1954 the statues stood instead by the Horse Guards barracks on the lane of the same name.

The interior changed along with the building's function over the years: in 1873 a modest spectators' box was replaced by an imperial box, with the work overseen by the academician of architecture David Grimm. In 1931 a second storey was added to the riding hall. During the Soviet decades it housed NKVD vehicles (to a design by the architect Nikolai Lanceray), and during the war the building suffered heavy damage from shelling.

On 5 November 1977 the building hosted its first exhibition — works by Leningrad painters marking the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution — and the façade was restored to Quarenghi's original appearance at that time. The space was directed by Nikolai Serdyuk (until 1987), then for nearly twenty years by Dina Gradova, and from 2005 to 2015 by Kirill Kuzmin. Restoration and technical modernisation were carried out in 2013–2016 by a team led by the architect Alexander Kriventsov; Pavel Prigara became the new director in 2015. The collection of works by St Petersburg artists, assembled over the decades, became the basis for a new branch opened in 2016 — a museum devoted to the city's twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Today it is the city's largest exhibition venue, showing painting and sculpture.