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Konstantin Melnikov was born to a peasant family in Moscow in 1890. Through the efforts of the engineers to whom he was apprenticed he attended the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. Although he initially studied painting when he entered the school in 1905, he studied architecture from 1912 until he completed his studies in 1917. After the 1917 Revolution, Melnikov developed a new city plan for Moscow . From 1921 to 1923 he taught part time at his old school which had been renamed the Moscow Vkhutemas. |
he main portion of his work at this time, consisted almost entirely of worker's clubs within Moscow.
Melnikov rejected "method" in design, instead focusing on "intuition" as the important factor in expressing the social and symbolic meaning of a building. He attempted to reach an acceptable architectural solution that could be considered a blending of both Classicism and "Leftist modernism". His projects from the early 1930s responded to official demands for explicit and symbolic historicism.
Melinkov's style is difficult to categorize. In its experimental use of materials and form plus its attention to functionality, it has something in common with the so-called Expressionist pre-World War I architecture of the Germans Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno Taut, both of whom worked briefly in Russia at the time. It is frequently referred to as Constructivist because of the influence on Melnikov of Vladimir Tatlin , and because of Melnikov's desire that his buildings should express revolutionary Soviet social values.
The finest existing specimen of Melnikov's work is his own residence in Moscow , dating from 1929, which consists of two cylindrical towers decorated with a pattern of hexagonal windows. The architect fell out of political favor in 1937, survived the Stalinist purges, and lived in seclusion in this house, where he worked as a commission portrait painter until his death in 1974. This long silence was only broken by a single pavilion for the 1967 Montreal Expo. Melnikov's son Viktor, who, like his father, was a painter, also lived and worked in this landmark, and fought to have it preserved as a museum until he died in February 2006. The house also contains a significant portion of Konstantin S. Melnikov's archive.
