The Richelieu Lyceum Project by Auguste de Montferrand

This article examines the Richelieu Lyceum, an unrealized architectural project by French architect Henri Louis Auguste Ricard, alias de Montferrand (1786–1858), designed in 1817 for the city of Odesa (formerly in the Russian Empire, now Ukraine). The lyceum was a new building type: a school facility incorporating critical elements of 19th-century educational design and significant landscape interventions highlighting the natural environment, leading to an ecologically sound building. Over the last several decades, certain aspects of Odesa’s architecture and city planning have attracted scholarly attention, but much about the built environment of this metropolis remains to be examined. Analyzing Montferrand’s architectural drawings for the Richelieu Lyceum alongside contemporary memoirs, travelers’ diaries, and published documents in the context of 19th-century European architecture and education builds a picture of the educational ideals of the period and their manifestation in Odesa’s urban landscape.