Zug, Simon Gottlieb or Szymon Bogumił Zug (1733–1807). Saxon architect, born in Dresden. He settled in Poland where he designed many distinguished
Neo-Classical buildings. He was responsible for the Guardhouse of the Wilanów Palace, Warsaw (1775–6), and the circular domed Protestant Church, Warsaw (1777–81-destroyed 1939, rebuilt 1950), with its severe
Doric portico, the first example of a Neo-Classical church in Poland. For
Kazimierz Poniatowski (1721–1800) he designed at Solec (1772) the first of a series of charming landscape gardens influenced by English models, and for Princess Izabela Czartoryska (1746–1835) he laid out the
jardin anglais at Powązki, near Warsaw (1770s—now the Cemetery), with Jan Piotr Norblin (the French landscape-painter Jean-Pierre Norblin de la Gourdaine (1745–1830)), and contributed an article on Polish gardens to Hirschfeld's
Theorie der Gartenkunst (Theory of the Art of Gardening—1785), one of the seminal works on late-C18 gardens in Europe. At Natolin, near Warsaw, he designed the beautiful
pavilion (1780–2), with its main elliptical domed room half-open to the garden through a screen of
Ionic columns, an idea perhaps derived from de
Wailly's Montmusard (1764). His most interesting work (again with Norblin) is Arkadia, near Nieborów (1777–98), the
Picturesque garden laid out for Princess Helena Radziwiłł (1745–1821): it has a lake, various
fabriques, including a
Gothic House, an eclectic ‘high priest's sanctuary’, a megalithic grotto of the Sybil,
arcades, a ‘Greek’ arch, an
aqueduct, an
Île des Peupliers complete with
cenotaph as a mnemonic of Rousseau's tomb at Ermenonville in France, and a Temple of Diana with a curious interior of curved rooms. He also designed a block in Warsaw (1784–5) with a ground-floor featuring
primitive unfluted Greek
Doric columns supporting arches, reminiscent of the work of
Ledoux.
Bibliography
Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, cxvi (2004), 83–126;
Garden History, xxiii/1 (Summer 1995), 91–112;
Lorentz & and Rottermund (1984);
Loza (1954);
Mosser & Teyssot (eds.) (1991);
Piwkoski (1998)
