in St Petersburg From 1752 to 1762 Felten worked as assistant to the celebrated architect
Bartolomeo Rastrelli during the construction of the
Winter Palace and other buildings in and around
St. Petersburg. In the 1760s and 1770s he designed a complex ensemble enclosing the south side of
Palace Square, now partially incorporated into the present buildings of the
General Staff. At the same time, he designed the Old Hermitage, a wing of the growing
Hermitage complex on the waterfront, and worked on the winter garden on the roof of the
Small Hermitage, as well as extending the museum's galleries. Yury Felten enjoyed the trust and respect of Empress Catherine the Great. She commissioned much work from him in
Tsarskoye Selo, such as the
Zubov wing of the
Catherine Palace, as well as his contributions at the Winter Palace and elsewhere. He also designed two Lutheran churches in central St. Petersburg, the
Chesme Palace (: damaged during the
Siege of Leningrad and restored in 1946) and the
Church of Saint John at Chesme Palace. Felten was also an inventor and engineer. He built a heavy-lifting machine that moved the granite rock that became the pedestal of
the Bronze Horseman. To this day, the pedestal is the largest stone ever moved by man. From 1764, Felten taught architecture at the
Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1789, he was appointed the director of the Academy, a position he kept for the rest of his life. He died in 1801 in St. Petersburg. Arguably his best-known work is not a building but the cast-iron railing (1783) on the Neva side of the
Summer Garden in St. Petersburg. Another one of his notable buildings is the
Annenkirche, Saint Petersburg. ==References==