Ivan Yegorovich Starov
b. Moscow, 1744;
d. St Petersburg, 1808.

Ivan Yegorovich Starov was the founder of the simple, antique-inspired Empire style of Russian classicism, and one of its spatially most original exponents. From a church family, Starov entered the new Moscow University’s gymnasium (secondary school) in 1755, and then from 1758 was among the first pupils in the new Academy of the Three Arts (later Academy of Arts), soon transferring with the school to St Petersburg (Leningrad). He was consistently top student in architecture under Vallin de la Mothe and Alexander Kokorinov, and his gold-medal scholarship to Europe (1762) led to five years under Charles de Wailly in Paris and one in Rome; he returned to St Petersburg in 1768. From 1772 he worked in the Commission for Masonry Building of St Petersburg and Moscow (the planning and development office for all Russian towns), and in 1786-9 he was chief architect of the Office of Her Imperial Majesty’s Buildings and Parks. A keen teacher, he became a professor at the Academy School in 1785 and its Deputy Director in 1794. A series of great country house complexes showed Starov’s spatial inventiveness and formal originality within a pure Greek canon novel to Russia. French clarity from de la Mothe combined with Kokorinov’s concern for local conditions and site to reproduce brilliantly free interpenetrations of internal spaces and the larger landscape, in particular through circular and oval plan elements, bold three-dimensional use of columns and an equally new clarity in overall form.