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Lot 462
462
Iakov Georgevich Chernikhov (1889-1951)

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis. IAKOV GEORGIEVICH CHERNIKHOV (1889, Pavlograd, Ukraine -1951, Moscow) 'What I am trying to do is to establish a clear and precise basis for constructive concepts and principles and to elucidate their essence, their logic, their rules and their laws.' (I.G. Chernikhov, The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms, Leningrad, 1931) Iakov Georgievich Chernikhov was a prolific Ukrainian architect, designer, theorist and teacher. He graduated in 1925 from the Academy of Arts in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), before becoming an instructor and professor in 1926 at St Petersburg's Institute of Railway Engineering. His fascination for industrial architecture led him to write a series of books on architecture between 1927 and 1933. Around 1928, Chernikhov founded The Research and Experimental Laboratory of Architectural Forms and Methods of Graphic Representation in Leningrad which subsequently moved to Moscow. Here he prepared the visual materials for his various publications. He aimed in his theoretical writings to train architectural students in all design professions in order to perfect their fluency in the underlying grammars of formal construction. Over fifty buildings of various types following Chernikhov's designs and theories were erected across the U.S.S.R. These factories, railway stations, housing blocks and abattoirs were considered as highly distinguished in terms of quality, compared to the low-level Soviet constructions of the time. Throughout his career, Chernikhov always remained independent taking a synthetic approach to both his teaching methods and his theories of architectural designs. Rather than rigourously adhering to any one of the contemporary theories of Suprematism, Constructivism or Rationalism, Chernikhov encompassed, reworked and unified these various philosophies within his own writings. His most famous texts include Fundamentals of Contemporary Architecture published in 1930, in which he demonstrated his main approach to teaching methods of architecture. In 1931, Chernikov also completed his fifth book, titled The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms and two years later he published his most influential book Architectural Fantasies (1933). In the latter, he devised an exciting and unusual series of innovative designs for hypothetical industrial structures. These were based on his design theory concerning the problems of formal construction in architecture, expounded in his two 1930 and 1931 works mentioned above. following lots (462-466) comprise some of his original drawings of his own writings.
Iakov Georgevich Chernikhov (1889-1951)

Architectural composition no. 195

Details
Iakov Georgevich Chernikhov (1889-1951) Architectural composition no. 195 watercolour, brush, pen and ink and pencil on paper (with a section of a handwritten list on the reverse, numbered 'N199') 11 5/8 x 9 3/8 in. (29.6 x 23.4 cm.) Executed circa 1931
Provenance
The artist's estate.
Private collection, by whom acquired from the artist's family in 1998. Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1999.
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Lot Essay

Margarita Leonidovna Chernikhova, the widow of the artist's son, has confirmed the authenticity of this work.

This drawing was published under no. 195 in Chernikhov's Fundamentals of Contemporary Architecture (Osnovy sovremennoi arkhitektury) first published in 1930 in Leningrad, and reprinted in 1931.
Chernikov in the mid-20 with students in a technical school, learning to draw machine components.

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