Adam Menelaws

Adam Menelaws
Portrait by Vladimir Borovikovsky
Born	1748 to 1756 presumably Edinburgh
Died	31 August 1831 Saint Petersburg
Nationality	Scottish
Occupation	Architect
Projects	Alexandria Park, Petergof

Adam Menelaws, also spelled Menelas (born between 1748 and 1756, presumably in Edinburgh – died 31 August 1831 in Saint Petersburg, Russian: Адам Адамович Менелас) was an architect and landscape designer of Scottish origin, active in the Russian Empire from 1784 to 1831. Menelaws achieved success in the first two decades of the 19th century as the designer of town and country residences and parks of Razumovsky and Stroganov families, and later worked for emperor Alexander I, specializing in Gothic Revival architecture. From 1825 to 1831 Menelaws, then in his seventies, became the first house architect of Nicholas I and de facto the leading architect of the Empire. Except for this final, properly evidenced, stage, life story of Adam Menelaws remains scarcely documented and has been reconstructed by biographers based on sketchy archive data and circumstantial evidence; Menelaws still "belongs to the category of almost unknown".

The Scottish origin of Menelaws was confirmed by the architect himself to A. B. Granville, an English traveler who published a report of his journey in London in 1828. There is no other reliable evidence of his early years, education and experience prior to arriving in Russia in 1784. Members of Menelaws family were construction contractors in Argyll; Howard Colvin and Dmitry Shvidkovsky suggest that Adam Menelaws belonged to the same family, but this opinion has not been reliably confirmed by archive research. Historians split over the year of his birth: a 1784 immigration record suggests that he arrived in Russia at the age of 35, i.e. born in or around 1748, while the funeral records of the English church in Saint Petersburg state the year of his birth as 1756. In 1803 Menelaws asserted that he hails from a noble English family, but Russian authorities refused to honour his claim.