 In 1865 Grimm and Robert Gedike jointly took part in the contest to design a new cathedral in Tbilisi but lost to Victor Schroeter and Alexander Huhn.Schroeter-Huhn proposal, if executed, would have been the largest Neo-Byzantine structure of its time.The client - viceroy of the Caucasus Mikhail Nikolayevich - dismissed the Schroeter-Huhn proposal as too expensive; he supported the Grimm-Gedike draft but instructed the architects to decrease its size to cut costs.