(b Peterhof, 11 Aug 1856; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], 8 Feb 1928). Architect and teacher, son of (1) Nikolay Benois. He graduated in architecture from the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, in 1879 with the Great Gold Medal, having already started teaching at the Society for Encouragement of the Arts two years previously. His first executed building was a country house (1882) near Kiev; in the same year his Bartolomeo Rastrelli-inspired competition design for the Church of the Blood, St Petersburg, a memorial to Tsar Alexander II (reg 1855–81), took third prize to two neo-Russian schemes. Benois’s design is described by his brother (3) Alexandre Benois as ‘probably the best thing he ever produced’. In his subsequent prolific design career Leonty Benois’s most important executed buildings included Orthodox cathedrals in Warsaw (1893–1912) and Darmstadt (1897–1904); the Institute of Gynaecology and Midwifery (1897–1904) and ‘Rossiya’ Insurance Company headquarters (1896–1900), both St Petersburg; a series of commercial and residential buildings for the First Russian Insurance Company in Moscow (1905–6; with A. I. Gunst (1862–1938)) and St Petersburg (1911–14; with Yu. Yu. Benois (1852–1929)); the State Printing House (1908–10), the French Embassy Chapel (1908–9; with Marian Peretyatkovich) and the Exhibition Building on the Griboyedov Canal (1914–16; now the Benois Wing of the State Russian Museum), all in St Petersburg. Stylistically, they are predominantly essays in various neo-Renaissance idioms, with neo-Russian and a quiet, slightly gothicized Moderne (Russian Art Nouveau) for the ecclesiastical works. Their cultivated and urbane professionalism makes them well suited to an urban context, but none is an innovative masterpiece. Their undemonstrative forms and detailing reflect the objections voiced in his circle, notably by Alexandre Benois and the critic Georgy Lukomsky (1884–1952), to the vulgarly bourgeois and self-assertive commercial buildings that were destroying the formal coherence of St Petersburg as a Neo-classical, imperial city. Leonty’s particular contribution to this cause was in urban planning. In 1908–9 he began lobbying the city council to accept the need for basic planning controls and the provision of Western-style utilities and transport, as a means to channel entrepreneurial energy into suitable locations and building forms. This led to the widely published and exemplary ‘Plan for the transformation of St Petersburg’ (1911; with F. Ye. Yenakyev and Peretyatkovich) and the establishment of modern urban planning as a professional and academic topic in St Petersburg.

Part of the Benois family

• Benois, Leonty (Nikolayevich)
  • Benois
  • St Petersburg, §II: Art life and organization
  • Uzbekistan, §2: Architecture
  • collaboration
    • Peretyatkovich, Marian
  • pupils
    • Belogrud, Andrey
    • Gel’freykh, Vladimir
    • Il’in, Lev
    • Lansere: (2) Nikolay Lansere
    • Lidval’, Fyodor
    • Pokrovsky, Vladimir
    • Rudnev, Lev
    • Shchuko, Vladimir
    • Shchusev, Aleksey, §1: Early work, before 1918
    • Vasil’yev, Nikolay
  • works
    • Darmstadt, §1(ii): History and urban development, 1806 and after