Jean-Laurent Le Geay

Jean-Laurent Le Geay (c. 1710 – after 1786) was a French neoclassical architect with an unsatisfactory career largely spent in Germany. His artistic personality remained shadowy until recently, though he was allowed to have had numerous pupils among the avant-garde of neoclassicism. He won the Prix de Rome in architecture in 1732, which, after an unaccountable delay, sent him for study to the French Academy in Rome from December 1738 to January 1742, when the Director, Jean François de Troy, remarked of him on his departure "il y a du feu et du génie". After he returned to Paris, there is no record of him, but about 1745 he was in Berlin, where he published eight etchings (1747–48) of plans and elevations for St Hedwig's Church (today's St. Hedwig's Cathedral), Berlin, which he produced in collaboration with Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, until recently the chief architect to Frederick II of Prussia; the church was eventually built to a modified version of the plan, by Johann Boumann, from June 1748, and Johann Gottfried Büring, in 1772–3.

Le Geay served as architect to Christian Ludwig II, Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin from October 1748 until the Duke's death in 1756. For him he designed the formal water-garden at Schwerin, but built nothing; his project for Ludwigslust remained on paper, and his assistant, Johann Joachim Busch began the work in 1763, after Le Geay's departure. In 1756 he was appointed first architect to Frederick of Prussia. For Frederick he designed a Communs (or service-wing), in the form of semicircular colonnades flanked by domed and porticoed pavilions, to stand before the Neues Palais, Potsdam; the project was realized in 1765-66 to slightly altered designs by Carl von Gontard. He added a ballroom to the schloss at (Eriksen 1974; Erouart 1982) but after quarrelling with the King in 1763, Le Geay seems to have built little.

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