Architect Leonidov is a well-known representative of the Russian avant-garde. His work was in the Soviet period, when the ideas that he proposed were in great demand. The master of the so-called "paper architecture" and constructivism left a bright and noticeable mark in this direction of art.
Childhood and youth
Architect Leonidov was born on February 9, 1902. He was born on the farm Vlasikha in the territory of the Tver province. After four classes in a rural school, for some time he was a student of a village icon painter, over time he began to travel regularly to Petrograd to work.
In 1921, Ivan Ilyich Leonidov became a student of the painting faculty of VKhUTEMAS. Over time, he is transferred to Vesnin's studio, where he begins to study painting directly.
Early career
Architect Ivan Leonidov has been actively participating in competitions since 1925. His work has been repeatedly awardedprizes and awards. These include the project of a peasant hut, a university in Minsk, residential buildings in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, as well as typical workers' clubs.
While studying at the university, the hero of our article begins to take an active part in the creative association of constructivists OSA, published in their magazine. By the time Leonidov graduated from VKhUTEMAS, constructivism was in a difficult position. The main threat was the possibility of the emergence of formal stylistic clichés.
Only in the second half of the 1920s, Soviet architects managed to get away from dangerous trends, making a significant contribution to the problem of shaping, as well as to the related relationship to volumetric-spatial composition. The architect Leonidov took an active part in solving these issues.
Lenin Institute
The hero of our article also played a big role in the development of constructivism. The graduation project of the architect Leonidov was dedicated to the Lenin Institute in the capital. It was presented to the public in 1927. The solution proposed by Ivan when designing the auditorium was very unusual. He proposed to make it in the form of a huge ball raised above the ground on metal structures.
Next to the main auditorium, according to the project of architect Leonidov, there was to be a vertical parallelepiped for storing literature. It was in these ideas that Ivan Ilyich's innovative understanding of the principles of building a modern city, as well as the organization of its elements in space, was clearly expressed for the first time.
The architectural ensemble of Leonidov was considered as a groupbuildings that compositionally occupy a certain part of the space, which in this situation plays a unifying, rather than a subordinate role. The connection with nature was evident for him not only in taking into account the surrounding vegetation and terrain, but also in the interaction of the building itself with space.
When creating the project of this educational institution, the architect Leonidov showed such a feature of his work as the desire to reveal artistic possibilities in any element, no matter how laconic the very form of the building may be. Such an attitude to geometric volumes on his part was innovative, contributed to the search for a new architectural look. It was also of great importance that when creating three-dimensional compositions, the architect Ivan Leonidov relied on the latest achievements of contemporary technology, sought to maximize the qualitative capabilities of structures and any elements.
At the peak of opportunity
It is believed that the most fruitful and intense in creative terms for Leonidov was the time period from 1927 to 1930. During this period, he is directly involved in the work of the OCA, constantly discusses, defends his point of view.
Many famous works of Ivan Ilyich Leonidov date back to this time: projects of the monument to Columbus in Santo Domingo, the Palace of Culture, the House of Industry and Film Factory in Moscow, the Government House in Alma-Ata, socialist settlement in the territory of Magnitogorsk.
His main scientific work is the project of a club of a fundamentally newsocial type. With her, he speaks at the OCA congress in 1929. He designs a large-scale club complex, which, in his view, becomes the center of ordinary and everyday life of society, and not a ceremonial ensemble, as many before him did.
The type of club he developed was fundamentally different from those that were massively built at that time. Leonidov insisted on the need to create large club complexes that would consist of separate spaces. Between themselves, they had to be connected by buildings of universal and specialized purposes. According to its program, such a club, in fact, becomes a cultural and park complex. It included a universal hall, a botanical garden, laboratories, a library, sports grounds, a park, and a pavilion for kids. The whole composition was designed as freely and widely as possible.
When creating the film factory project, Leonidov presented many variations of the spatial and volumetric composition. Due to this, picturesqueness and complexity of layouts, rare for his works, have developed.
In an international competition, presenting a monument to Columbus, Leonidov abandoned the standard techniques when creating a monument. His project was permeated through and through with the idea of the common goals of mankind in the implementation of progress and internationalism. The work of the architect Leonidov on the monument to Columbus served as the basis for the creation of the project of the world scientific and cultural center. In it, he proposed to place an observatory, an institute for interplanetary communications, a hall for world scientific congresses, an airport, a television center, and much more. At the same time, the heartThe complex was supposed to become a museum dedicated just to Columbus. It was supposed to have a glass cover, and instead of walls, insulation in the form of air jets.
The projects of the House of Industry and "Tsentrsoyuz" became one of the first office buildings, made in the form of characteristic rectangular prisms with blank facades from the end and glass walls on the longitudinal side. The resulting parallelepipeds mastered the spatial we alth due to the removed elevator shafts and outbuildings that adjoined the main building.
Magnitogorsk Project
During the socialist resettlement of Magnitogorsk, Leonidov acted as an urban planner. He imagined that the new city would not have so-called corridor streets. He proposed his own version of the city-line, similar projects were already being developed by some other architects at that time. In his view, Magnitogorsk was supposed to develop along four highways that would depart from the industrial zone.
The city-line consisted of a strip of residential areas that alternated with educational institutions for children. Sports zones, public facilities and parks were to be located on the sides. Passenger and cargo highways were given a place on the periphery. At the same time, the city itself seemed to crash into a green massif.
Finally, another bright project in this creative period was the Palace of Culture in the Proletarsky district of the capital. Again moving away from the conditions of the competition, he focused on the development of the organization of a residential "cultural" area, continuing to develop his ideaa new social type of club. His Palace of Culture was an attempt to find a place for a new structure in a single system of an entire residential area. Taking into account the conditions of the increasing pace of modern life, the architect considered it reasonable to create a cultural complex in the form of a large-scale oasis, which would be isolated from city noise, so that a person could get psychological relaxation after a hard day's work.
At the same time, he conditionally divided the very territory of the Palace of Culture into four zones - sports, research, a zone of mass actions and a demonstration field. For each of these sectors, specific building types and rational layouts have been developed. For example, the sports hall was supposed to be in the shape of a pyramid, covered with glass hemispheres with mobile stages.
The project of this building by architect I. I. Leonidov became the reason for fierce discussions, which were devoted both to the fate of the club itself and to the problems of Soviet architecture in general.
Working in the 30s
In the 30s, the hero of our article works in several design organizations. In particular, he is engaged in the construction and planning of Igarka, develops projects for the reconstruction of Moscow, Serpukhovskaya Zastava Square, the Pravda newspaper club, and is working on the reconstruction of the Hermitage garden.
In the 30s, the biography of Ivan Ilyich Leonidov developed quite successfully. It was during this period that he created one of his best works - a competitive project of the Narkomtyazhprom house, which was supposed to appear onRed Square of the capital. The hero of our article got an original spatial composition of three glass towers, which differed in height, plan and silhouette. Between themselves, they were united by a stylobate at the level of the first floors. Of particular interest at that time was his approach to a large-scale modern structure, which was supposed to coexist with the architectural ensembles of the past.
In its structure, the entire architecture of Ivan Ilyich Leonidov, including this work, had a deep connection with the principles of building complexes located near the Ivan the Great Bell Tower and St. Basil's Cathedral.
In the second half of the 30s, the hero of our article was working on the Klyuchiki residential complex, which was supposed to appear in the Nizhny Tagil region, the Usolye village in the Urals, and the Artek pioneer camp. One of the large-scale projects of this period is the majestic staircase on the territory of the sanatorium in Kislovodsk.
Out of the crisis
In the 40s, Leonidov found himself in a creative crisis, which was aggravated by the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War. He manages to cope with it only in the post-war years.
In the 50s, the photo of the architect Ivan Leonidov was already well known to everyone, and his projects that have come down to our time testify to the beginning of a new creative upsurge. Most of them were not worked out completely, they remained only in the form of draft sketches. In particular, he creates sketches of the building of the United Nations, the "City of the Sun", the PalaceCouncils, many other large-scale structures.
At that time, rather complex and contradictory processes began in the sphere of shaping in architecture. First of all, they were associated with the rejection of the majority of creators from the traditions of functionalism, in which the simplest geometric forms would be used. Views on these problems changed, aesthetic ideals were revised, many curvilinear and complex forms appeared in architecture itself.
New forms in architecture
Leonidov, unlike many of his colleagues, who in the 50s abruptly switched from simple geometric shapes to curvilinear ones, was in a creative search. He did not reject the traditions that existed in the 20s. At the same time, he considered them as the basis of a new architecture, on which modern technology and fundamentally new aesthetic ideals should be based and developed.
If in the 20s-30s Leonidov himself used second-order curves in his works along with spherical and rectangular shapes, then in the 40s-50s he finds them most widely used. It is important to note that in the transition from the scale of the building to the scale of the city, he gave the key role in the volume-spatial composition to tent-shaped forms. He subordinated them to vaulted and rectangular volumes.
He managed, as in the late 1920s, to largely anticipate the processes that took place in shaping. For example, the appearance of those same tent-shaped forms. It is worth recognizing that at the level of instincts he felt the relationship between the scale of the structure andarchitectural form.
Proceedings
At that time, the hero of our article was already a real master, the photo of Ivan Ilyich Leonidov was well known to his contemporaries, but the amount of work he left turned out to be small. He never managed to realize any of his significant projects.
They all became a kind of theoretical declarations that were formulated in the language of architecture. In his works, Leonidov was constantly in search of new types of buildings, primarily in a social sense. He tried to solve fundamental and really important urban problems. In his projects, he concentrated on theoretical developments. Each of them at the same time became a real event in the architectural life. He forced many of his colleagues to take a fresh look at certain problems.
Leonidov managed to bring his theoretical developments to the level of search and experimental projects. At the same time, he strove to preserve generally significant ideas, many of the works were as detailed as possible. This was the main originality of his work.
Meaning of personality
The importance of an architect's personality is hard to underestimate. He made an invaluable contribution to the development of Soviet architecture in the 1920s.
He was a real architect with extraordinary talent, creating works that showed trends in the development of architecture for many years to come.
The main thing in his work was the rethinking of the social essencebuildings.
Leonidov died in 1959 at the age of 57. He fell dead on the stairs of the capital's Voentorg from acute heart failure. On his grave, in the cemetery in the village of Serednikovo, there is a monument in the form of a cube.
