The grandeur and mysteriousness of the cultural structures of St. Petersburg delights, and recently also asks a lot of questions. It seems there is intelligible official historical information about how Peter was built. But no, inquisitive minds do not want to put up with this and with ever-increasing enthusiasm are trying to deal with all this heritage. This question does not leave me either.
Everyone knows the granite framing of both forts in the Gulf of Finland and buildings in the city itself. This has been partially covered (but more shown) here and here.
Yes, there are a lot of questions with granite frames. But during the construction (and maybe during the reconstruction), other types of stone were also used. And here's what information I found about the Pudost stone.
It is known that the winner in the tender of that time for the construction of the Kazan Cathedral was the then little-known architect Andrei Nikiforovich Voronikhin. He was born in the Urals - a serf of Count AS Stroganov, and only a little more than ten years from the date of 1801, when the future builder of the Kazan Cathedral was twenty-six years old, he signed the count "vacation".
How could a serf peasant have a huge layer of knowledge and experience in building buildings and processing stone - let him remain on the conscience of historians. The only thing I can assume is that he gained experience in the construction of, say, the count's estate made of stone.
Kazan Cathedral.
And here is what Andrey Voronikhin decided to offer:
He decided to erect external columns made of Pudost stone. You can almost saw it with a saw, cut it with a knife. He is soft. But the fact of the matter is that this stone is soft only while it lies in the ground, near the village of Pudost, near Gatchina. And take it out of the ground - it turns out differently: the more it is in the air, the harder it becomes. It is easy to work the stone, and in terms of strength it is like marble.
Promotional video:
Samson Sukhanov (also a stone craftsman) knew this secret of Pudost stone and therefore supported the architect in every possible way. The Sukhanovskaya gang coped with the outer colonnade quickly. Like a stone grove has grown along the avenue. The columns for the inner vaults of the cathedral remained - 56 columns, made of granite …
Polished granite interior columns
And then on the verge of fantasy, even for modern production.
The outer columns are made of Pudost stone.
Pudost stone (obsolete Pudozh) - lime tuff, mined near the village of Pudost, Gatchinsky district of the Leningrad region.
The Pudost stone is often called limestone, which is incorrect, and is also confused with other similar rocks mined in the Gatchina region, for example, with the Paritsa or Chernitsky stone.
Pudost stone has a small volumetric mass, porosity, frost resistance, and is also easy to process, therefore it was used for decorative work - wall cladding, sculptures. It has interesting properties that other finishing materials do not have - it changes color depending on lighting and weather, taking on different shades of gray and yellowish-gray.
The reserves of stone in the Pudost quarries were rather small, so by the end of the 19th century, its reserves were almost completely depleted. However, back in the 1920s, this stone was used in the restoration of sculptures of the Rostral columns.
Note the undulating surface of the stone. Perhaps it was in fact - in the ground it was plastic (or so), and after mining and processing it turned to stone in the air. Well, as an option - there was a reaction of the components of the stone with atmospheric oxygen.
And this beauty:
molded in the formwork and cut with conventional tools easier than wood.
And they were molded in parts, placing the block on the block through some kind of spacers:
In Gatchina there are such structures from this breed:
And in conclusion, I want to offer another version of the information.
It's inside the same Kazan Cathedral. We beat off the corner. It turned out that it was a plaster "like granite". The rest of the photos can be viewed inside the post.
What do you think, is such a technology possible: this "plasticine" of Pudost stone was mixed with other components: crushed marble, granite, sand and such plaster was applied. They received, of course, not granite, but something similar, which was beaten off from this corner.
Could the technologies that were used in Peru in the era when these arrays were plastic be used in St. Petersburg:
Author: sibved