Ivan Zholtovsky

Ivan Vladislavovich Zholtovsky was a Soviet and Russian architect and educator. He worked primarily in Moscow from 1898 until his death. An accomplished master of Renaissance Revival architecture before the Russian Revolution, he later became a key figure of Stalinist architecture.

Early years

Ivan Zholtovsky was born in Plotnitsa, Minsk Governorate (in present-day Belarus) November 27, 1867. He joined Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg at the age of 20. Degree studies took 11 years till 1898 – strapped for cash, Ivan used to take long leaves working as apprentice for the Saint Petersburg architectural firms. By the time of graduation, Zholtovsky had a first-rate practical experience in design, technology and project management. He retained this hands-on approach for the rest of his career, being a construction manager in the original sense of architectural profession. Zholtovsky planned to relocate to Tomsk after graduation, but eventually received and accepted a quick job offer from Stroganov Art School in Moscow. He became a tutor in architecture just weeks after earning his own diploma – a part-time job that allowed plenty of time for professional practice.

Death and legacy

Zholtovsky was married twice and left no children. Since 1920 he lived in a 19th-century Stankevich House in Voznesensky lane. He died of pneumonia at the age of 92. s soon as he died, his widow, pianist Olga Arenskaya, was evicted from the house his art and antiques collection was dispersed. His widow survived Zholtovsky one year. Zholtovsky's creed was that architecture and construction process are indivisible; separation of architect from construction management reduces art to draftsmanship. Yet at the same time his work on reducing construction costs and evaluating new technologies in 1950s spelled the demise of profession in the USSR. This work, pushed forward in January 1951 by Nikita Khrushchev (then City of Moscow party boss), paved the road for a switch from masonry to prefab concrete in later 1950s. Zholtovsky workshop proposed various prefab concrete drafts, mixing new technologies with Stalinist exterior; this line of architecture never materialized: Khrushchev announced his war with "architectural excesses" in November 1955, just when the concrete industry acquired enough capacity for mass construction. Zholtovsky's last apartment block (Prospect Mira, 184) was stripped of "redundancies", and in ten years that followed, architecture separated from construction management and folded down to city planning and engineering.