Yakov Chernikhov
Yakov Georgievich Chernikhov December 1889 in Pavlograd, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire was a Russian architect and graphic designer known for working in the constructivist style. As an architect, painter, graphic artist, and architectural theorist, his greatest contribution was in the genre of architectural fantasy. He was described as the Soviet version of Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and Antonio Sant'Elia all at once. His books on architectural design published in Leningrad between 1927 and 1933 was also regarded amongst the most innovative texts of their time.
Early life
Chernikhov was born 17 December 1889, in Pavlograd, Katerynoslav province in a poor Jewish family composed of 11 children. His father, Georgy Pavlovich Chernikhov, owned restaurants on ships of the Volunteer Fleet. Their business suffered bankruptcy and their family moved to Odessa. A few years later, family moved back to Pavlograd to continue their life. After studying at the Odessa Art school">Odesa">Odessa Art school, Ukraine, where his teachers were Gennady Ladyzhensky and Kiriyak Kostandi, leading artists of the South Russian school, he moved in 1914 to Petrograd and joined the Architecture faculty of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1916, where he later studied under Leon Benois.Career
Greatly interested in futurist movements, including constructivism, and the suprematism of Malevich, he set out his ideas in a series of books and scholarly works in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including:- Osnovy sovremennoi arkhitektury
- Entazis i fust kolonny
- Tsvet i svet
- Estetika arkhitektury
- Krasota v arkhitekture
- The Art of Graphic Representation
- Analiz postroeniia klassicheskogo shrifta
- Konstruktsii arkhitekturnykh i mashinnykh form
- Arkhitekturnye fantazii. 101 kompozitsiia.
The 101 Architectural Fantasies, a very fine example of colour printing, was perhaps the last avant-garde art book to be published in Russia during the Stalinist era. Its remarkable designs uncannily predict the architecture of the later 20th century. However, his unusual ideas were not welcomed and distrusted by the regime. Although he continued his work as a teacher and held a number of one-man shows, few of his designs were built and very few appear to have survived. Amongst the latter is the tower of the 'Red Nailer' factory in St. Petersburg.
Chernikhov also produced a number of richly designed architectural fantasies of historic architecture, which were never exhibited in his lifetime. A book on 'The Construction of Letter Forms' containing some of his typographical designs, was published after his death in 1959.
Chernikhov was a tireless advocate for the importance of literacy in graphics. He believed that competency in representational skills — descriptive geometry, and drawing — was as necessary for every person as the ordinary skills of literacy. In addition to his very productive studio work, Chernikhov taught
in the system of special workers’ classes, was on the faculty of the architecture and construction departments of several institutions of higher learning, and developed a methodology for training students quickly and effectively in the fundamentals of graphics.
Chernikhov produced some 17,000 drawings and projects and was dubbed the Soviet Piranesi. On 8 August 2006, it was announced that some hundreds of Chernikhov's drawings, with an estimated value of $1,300,000, had gone missing from the Russian State Archives. Some 274 have been recovered, in Russia and abroad.