Konstantin Melnikov Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Konstantin Melnikov (1890-1974) was one of the most original architects of the Russian avant-garde. In a single decade he built the Soviet Pavilion at the 1925 Paris Exposition, a series of dramatic workers’ clubs and bus garages in Moscow, and his own house of two interlocking cylinders pierced by hexagonal windows. From the mid-1930s he was barred from building and spent the rest of his life painting and teaching.

Moscow and the avant-garde

Melnikov was born in Moscow in 1890 and studied painting and then architecture at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, graduating in 1917. He became known with the Makhorka tobacco pavilion at the 1923 All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition and Lenin’s first wooden sarcophagus in 1924.

Paris, clubs and garages

His Soviet Pavilion at the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris, a timber structure cut diagonally by a stair, won international attention. In Moscow he designed workers’ clubs, most famously the Rusakov Club (1928) with its three cantilevered auditoriums, and bus garages such as the Bakhmetevsky garage.

The Melnikov House

His own house in Krivoarbatsky Lane (1927-1929) is formed of two intersecting brick cylinders punctured by some 60 hexagonal windows. After official criticism of formalism he was effectively excluded from practice from 1936. He died in Moscow in 1974, and the house became a state museum.