Yakov Chernikhov

Chernikhov was born 17 December 1889, in Pavlograd, Katerynoslav province in a poor Jewish family composed of 11 children (five girls and six boys).

After studying at the Grekov Odessa Art school, Ukraine, where his teachers were Gennady Ladyzhensky and Kiriyak Kostandi, leading artists of the South Russian school,[4] he moved in 1914 to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) and joined the Architecture faculty of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1916, where he later studied under Leon Benois.

Greatly interested in futurist movements, including constructivism, and the suprematism of Malevich (with whom he was acquainted), he set out his ideas in a series of books and scholarly works in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including: In his first book, Osnovy sovremennoi arkhitektury, he was already anticipating the appearance of several great skyscrapers of the future: the Palace of the Soviets (1932), the Moscow University building on Vorob’yovye (Sparrow) Hills (1955).

[5] 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.

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.

In addition to his very productive studio work, Chernikhov taught in the system of special workers’ classes (rabfak), 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.

[7] 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.