Laurynas Gucevičius

Laurynas Gucevičius (; 1753–1798) was a Polish –Lithuanian architect from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where all of his designs were built.

Biography

He was born in the village of Migonys near Kupiškis, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. His father was a Lithuanian peasant, Simonas Masiulis. He was baptized as Laurynas Masiulis. In 1773, he joined the Academy of Vilnius. He studied engineering, attending the lectures on architecture held by Marcin Knackfus. Around that time, he also became a missionary monk.

His guardian became the Bishop of Vilnius, Ignacy Massalski, who in 1775, sent him to Warsaw, and a year or two later, to Rome. Along with a large number of young artists and architects from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (among them Chrystian Piotr Aigner, Szymon Bogumił Zug, Stanisław Zawadzki, Ephraim Schröger and Jakub Kubicki), he spent a year there studying classical architecture. After returning, Hugo Kołłątaj offered him a position as a professor of architecture at the Jagiellonian University.

In the following years, he travelled through Western European countries, where he attended lectures on architecture and learned from the works of the most renowned architects of the time. He visited France, Denmark, Sweden, and various German states.

In 1789, Gucevičius became a professor of architecture and topography at the Artillery and Engineering Corps' School of Vilnius. In 1794, he also returned to his alma mater, where he became a professor of civilian architecture

Around that time, Gucevičius created the most renowned of his works. First was the new town hall of Vilnius, completed around 1799. He also constructed a similar, yet smaller town hall in Vidzy (now in Belarus). Between 1777 and 1801, he worked to rebuild the Vilnius Cathedral (which had undergone many reconstructions and had been partially Baroque) in the neoclassical style. It is sometimes said that his reconstruction of the cathedral, modelled after a Roman temple, pre-dated the work of Thomas Hamilton and James Playfair, two notable Scottish architects to introduce classicism in the United Kingdom.

He is credited with several other projects, although their actual authorship is not documented. Among them is the palace of the Tyzenhauz family in Rokiškis (completed in 1801), the reconstruction of the castle in Raudonė for its contemporary owners, the Olędzki (Olendzki) h. Rawicz family, and the manor house in Čiobiškis. He is also thought to have prepared designs of palaces for other notable magnate families of the time, including Radziwiłł, Sapieha, Pac, Chomiński, and Scypion. Additionally, he designed several merchant houses in Kretinga. In his last will, he dedicated all of his projects to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and some of the surviving sketches and designs are currently held in the library of Warsaw University.

Legacy The architect's life and creations inspired the Lithuanian poet Justinas Marcinkevičius to write the play The Cathedral.