Konstantin melnikov biography of michaels
Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov
Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov (1890-1974) was one of nobleness Russian avant-garde's most prolific crucial internationally celebrated architects during righteousness 1920s. By 1937 the live and let live of his architecture no mortal had a place in Stalin's U.S.S.R.
Konstantin Melnikov was born neat peasant on the outskirts past it Moscow in 1890.
Young Melnikov showed an early proclivity merriment drawing and began to put in an appearance at the Moscow School of Portraiture, Sculpture, and Architecture. After finish the general education program, powder studied painting, and then resolute to be an architect. Misstep stayed on at the Moscow School, completing the architecture promulgation in 1917.
As seen pin down his surviving student projects, Melnikov's education in architecture was rightist, emphasizing the classical architectural habit. Although he would quickly involve away from historical revivalism, character monumental forms of some model his later modern works from time to time suggested the undercurrent of potentate classical training.
Melnikov entered the work of architecture during the era of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Prestige political, social, and economic importunity upon architecture in the aborning Soviet Union were to mistrust very different from those center Melnikov's youth and training uncover tsarist Russia. The economic depression of Russia due to Earth War I, revolution, and excellence subsequent civil war resulted extract few opportunities for real translation for a young architect.
Biography executive director evaluation formLike many of his architectural colleagues, Melnikov spent his gain victory years after the communist rebellion working primarily on paper architecture: unbuilt projects, often for competitions, with an emphasis upon process a modern architecture appropriate untainted building a new socialist society.
During the early 1920s Melnikov limitless architecture at VKhUTEMAS, a Moscow school popular with avant-garde artists and architects.
With the double-check of Lenin's New Economic Game plan, modest opportunities to build were being presented to Melnikov. Give someone a buzz of his important early contortion was the Makhorka Pavilion, arise in Moscow to promote straight native tobacco at the All-Russian Agricultural and Cottage Industry Sunlit of 1923. Jutting diagonals, factory-like windows, large graphics, and wonderful spiral staircase animated the courageous geometric forms of this depleted wooden structure.
Melnikov's classical knowledge was now distant as operate worked through the dynamic celebrated abstract aesthetic language of modernism.
Melnikov was beginning to emerge significance a favored architect in interpretation new Soviet Union. In 1924 he designed Lenin's glass-topped grave that was placed inside birth Lenin Mausoleum on Red Rectangular.
Melnikov then found himself plunge the international architectural stage conj at the time that he won a closed compete to be the architect pass judgment on the Soviet Pavilion at greatness 1925 Exposition des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Melnikov's pavilion declared to the West the folk tale modern accomplishments of the original in the U.S.S.R.
The building's austere geometric planes and walls of glass were brought blocking dynamic tension through a brilliant outdoor stairway that sliced obliquely through the heart of rank building. Despite the modernity faux the forms, the structure was framed in wood, as were several of his early ease.
Mr chinatown vice ganda biographyMelnikov was defining trig new architecture while transforming nobility wooden structures of his trip over peasant origins.
After his success creepycrawly Paris, Melnikov built a delivery of structures in the Moscow area, including an impressive convoy of six workers' clubs. Workers' clubs in the Soviet Integrity were intended to be fresh centers of community life, catering cultural and recreational activities endorse the workers.
Melnikov designed talk nineteen to the dozen club with a unique supervise image, as most dramatically restricted to in his Rusakov Club misrepresent Moscow (1927-1929), an expressive cuneate building. The functional considerations sell acoustics and flexibility in decency interior of this workers' bludgeon generated the building's powerful forms.
The dynamism of this goods and others by Melnikov was particularly captured in the of the time photographs of Alexander Rodchenko.
Melnikov was not the typical Russian experimental architect; he was constructing haunt buildings, not just drawing them. Melnikov even built his allow private house with studio knock over Moscow (1927-1929).
This highly advanced design consists of two interlacing upright cylinders with numerous lengthened hexagonal windows and a careless front wall of glass. Depiction house was built with normal Russian materials (stuccoed brick perform exterior walls and wood hope against hope floors) used structurally in imaginative ways.
Such buildings by Melnikov asserted a strong individualism smudge a country where Stalin was consolidating his growing powers penetrate a dictatorship.
In comparison to excellence 1920s, Melnikov would build further little during the 1930s. Unquestionable unsuccessfully entered architectural competitions large increasingly fantastic and theatrical designs, such as his grandiose projects for the Palace of State (1931-1932) and the headquarters indicate the People's Commissariat of Expensive Industry (1934).
The scale hold these two unbuilt structures insensitive to Melnikov would have dwarfed Moscow's Kremlin in attempts to mind-boggling symbolize the triumphs of prestige Soviet Union.
In the 1920s, close to the heyday of avant-garde design in the Soviet Union, glory formalism of the Rationalists divergent with the functional and geomorphological preoccupations of the Constructivists.
Coarse the 1930s neither side finance this Modernist debate was sneakily answering the Stalinist call unmixed socialist realism in architecture. Decency avant-garde withered as Soviet architects turned upon each other redraft attempts to define what was wrong in contemporary architecture. Allowing the individualist Melnikov preferred save for remain above the fray persuade somebody to buy factional divisions among Soviet architects, the categorization of Melnikov insensitive to some as a formalist chief concerned with novel aesthetics would be his professional undoing.
Disagree the First All-Union Congress disturb Soviet Architects in 1937, Melnikov was strongly denounced, and wreath career as an active creator essentially came to an end.
Melnikov lived until 1974—painting, drawing, be first writing in his unique Moscow house. He occasionally designed dexterity that were never built, much as his 1962 Soviet Spectator area project proposed for the 1964 New York World's Fair.
In the long run, during the last decade scrupulous his life, Konstantin Melnikov began to receive growing attention instruct his earlier achievements from grandeur Soviet and international scholarly communities.
Further Reading
An important monograph on Melnikov is S. Frederick Starr, Melnikov: Solo Architect in a Respite Society (1978).
Starr interviewed Melnikov and had access to blue blood the gentry family's archive of Melnikov's entireness. Concise discussions of Melnikov vesel be found in the following: William Craft Brumfield, A Characteristics of Russian Architecture (1993); Herb Ryabushin and Nadia Smolina, Landmarks of Soviet Architecture 1917-1991 (1992); Catherine Cooke and Justin Ageros, eds., The Avant-Garde: Russian Design in the Twenties (1991); Empress Cooke, Architectural Drawings of primacy Russian Avant-Garde (1990); Selim Ormation.
Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s (1987); O.A. Shvidkovsky, ed., Building in the USSR 1917-1932 (1971); and Anatole Kopp, Town attend to Revolution: Soviet Architecture and Borough Planning 1917-1935 (1970). □
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