In the 1930s, Melnikov refused to conform with the rising Stalinist architecture[citation needed], withdrew from practice and worked as a portraitist and teacher until the end of his life.

His father, Stepan Illarionovich Melnikov, originally from Nizhny Novgorod region, was a road maintenance foreman, employed by the Moscow Agricultural Academy.

The whole family occupied a single room of a state-managed working class barrack in Hay Lodge (Соломенная сторожка),[2] then a quiet northern suburb of Moscow.

[3] Konstantin met his "golden day in life" ("это был золотой день в моей жизни")[4] through a milk delivery woman, who happened to serve the family of Vladimir Chaplin, a wealthy engineer.

Chaplin overestimated Melnikov's basic education, and Konstantin failed his grammar test at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1904.

Later, he recalled Konstantin Korovin, Sergey Malyutin and Abram Arkhipov as his mentors in art; as for architecture, he gave his regards only to Ivan Zholtovsky, his professor in 1917–1918.

In 1918–1920, he was employed by the New Moscow planning workshop headed by Zholtovsky and Alexey Shchusev, designing Khodynka and Butyrsky District sectors of the city.

[10] In 1925 Melnikov designed and built the Soviet pavilion at the Paris Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes.

The result, Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, housed 104 buses on 8500 square meters of an unconventional, parallelogram-shaped floorplan with Vladimir Shukhov's roof system.

Melnikov's later garage buildings, on the contrary, possessed a clear avant-garde external styling (which has become badly damaged over time): The "golden season" of 1927 continued with a chain of trade union commissions for workers' clubs.

Absence of public contests for these buildings was favorable to Melnikov, who was promoted by enthusiastic trade union commissioners, regardless of design complexity or political and artistic affiliations.

One common feature of his clubs – bold use of exterior stairs – is actually a consequence of 1920s building codes that required wide internal staircase for fire evacuation.

[17] The finest existing specimen of Melnikov's work is his own Krivoarbatsky Lane residence in Moscow, completed in 1927–1929, which consists of two intersecting cylindrical towers decorated with a pattern of hexagonal windows.

At this time, many well-to-do Russians were into building their own city houses; Melnikov was one of the few who managed to retain his property after the fall of New Economic Policy.

As the Russian idiom says, he designed the house starting "from the hearth"; existing white oven in his living room dates back to his 1920 drawings.

Melnikov developed the concept of intersecting cylinders in 1925-1926 for his Zuev Workers' Club draft (he lost the contest to Ilya Golosov).

This unorthodox design was a direct consequence of material rationing by the state – Melnikov was limited to brick and wood, and even these were in short supply.

He was not exactly forgotten; on the contrary, his Rusakov Club and Arbat house were present in many Soviet textbooks as examples of Formalism[citation needed].