David Grimm was born in a
Lutheran German family and attended the German
Saint Peter's School in
Saint Petersburg. He completed the class of
Alexander Brullov at the
Imperial Academy of Arts in 1841–1848. His graduation honours entitled Grimm to take an Academy-sponsored study tour of Italy and France, but it was cancelled due to the
revolutions of 1848 in
Europe. Rather than waiting until the end of hostilities, Grimm opted for a study tour of the
Caucasus (1849–1850) that exposed him to the wealth of vernacular
Georgian and
Armenian architecture. In 1852–1855 Grimm travelled to
Asia Minor,
Italy and
Greece, studying the Byzantine relics. These studies were summarized in Grimm's 12-volume
Monuments of Byzantine architecture in Georgia and Armenia (1859–1856) and subsequent works. Grimm became a professor of the
Institute of Civil Engineers in 1856 and at the Academy in 1859. In 1858 empress
Maria Alexandrovna commissioned Grimm to design the cathedral in
Chersonesos, on the site of a Greek church where
Vladimir I of Kiev was
baptized in 988. Construction of the cathedral commenced before the
Crimean War to the design by
Konstantin Thon; after the war, his design was discarded and work began from scratch. Maria's choice was influenced by another Byzantine scholar,
Grigory Gagarin. Grimm's design was approved in June 1859 and displayed to the public the next year. Unlike contemporary Byzantine architects, Grimm based his draft on Georgian legacy, employing
polygonal surfaces instead of Byzantine cylinders and domes. Construction started in 1861 and, despite royal sponsorship, proceeded very slowly: the structure was completed in 1876, and the interiors in 1897. The
Chersonesus Cathedral remained a sole example of the Georgian line in Byzantine revival until it reappeared shortly before
World War I. The other commission of the
Romanovs, a Byzantine chapel in
Nice, commemorating the late
Nicholas Alexandrovich, was completed in less than two years, 1866–1868). In the next twenty years Grimm designed numerous Orthodox "embassy churches", including the
Russian Church, Geneva, the
Alexander Nevsky Church, Copenhagen and the
Church of Mary Magdalene in
Jerusalem; according to the state preference, they were executed in the
Russian Revival theme of 17th century
Yaroslavl architecture. In 1865 Grimm and
Robert Gedike jointly took part in the contest to design a new
cathedral in Tbilisi but lost to
Victor Schroeter and
Alexander Huhn. Schroeter-Huhn proposal, if executed, would have been the largest Neo-Byzantine structure of its time. The client –
viceroy of the Caucasus Mikhail Nikolayevich – dismissed the Schroeter-Huhn proposal as too expensive; he supported the Grimm-Gedike draft but instructed the architects to decrease its size to cut costs. The building that was completed in 1871–1897 followed the original Russian scheme of a single dome with four symmetrical
apses created by
Roman Kuzmin in 1861, yet Grimm changed his proportions to create a tall, vertical
silhouette. Grimm's draft, publicised in the 1860s, paved the road to numerous variations of the same single-dome layout and was perfected by
Vasily Kosyakov in the 1880s. Grimm's last design, the
burial vault of Grand Dukes in
Peter and Paul Fortress, remained on paper: after Grimm's death, the project was taken over by
Antony Tomischko, who also died soon, and the Vault was redesigned and completed by
Leon Benois in
Baroque style. David Grimm was buried at
Smolenskoe Lutheran Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. His son, (1865–1942), was also a successful architect; his grandson, (1904–1959), was an educator and historian of art. ==Buildings==