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Ilya Golosov

Moscow, Russia
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Ilya Alexandrovich Golosov (1883, Moscow - 1945, Moscow) was a Russian Soviet architect. A leader of Constructivism in 1925-1931, Ilya Golosov later developed his own style of early Stalinist architecture known as Postconstructivism. Ne was a brother of Panteleimon Golosov, also an architect.

Golosov studied in the Stroganov School of Arts and Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, graduating in 1912. Before World War I, he trained in the workshops of Igor Grabar and Alexey Shchusev, and collaborated with Marian Peretyatkovich and Ivan Rerberg on Northern Insurance Buildings (Moscow). In 1918, Golosov joined Moscow state architectural office led by neoclassicist Ivan Zholtovsky, and stayed with him throughout the Civil war, at the same time teaching at the MVTU and VKhUTEMAS.

Golosov's work during the Civil War and first years of New Economic Policy was limited to city planning projects, landscaping and repairs. He participated in numerous architectural competitions of the twenties, starting with the 1922-1923 House of Labour. In 1924, Golosov joined the constructivist movement, the OSA Group at its inception in December, 1925. His designs of this period feature carefully thought-out exterior glass walls, emphasizing inner structure of the dominant shape. Apart from numerous contest entries, Golosov won many practical commissions. Like the Vesnin brothers, he had a formal pre-revolutionary education and engineering experience, helping him win the real jobs. Unlike theorists like Moisei Ginzburg or Ivan Leonidov, Golosov was busy with actually managing construction sites, and abstained from the theoretical debates of 1925-1929. Yet, for a brief period in 1925-1928, fellow architects perceived him as the leader of constructivism, due to his highly publicized completed designs like the 1925 Zuev Workers' Club and a streak of contest entries in 1926.

In 1932, when avant-garde architecture was abandoned in favour of a neoclassical style, Golosov responded with an adaptation of his symbolic romanticism concept. For a short period, 1932-1936, this new style, Postconstructivism (a term coined by Selim Khan-Magomedov), became the most common in Soviet Russia. Unlike Konstantin Melnikov, who lost his job in 1936, Golosov was employed in practical construction until 1941 with typical Postconstructivist buildings like the Teplobeton apartments on Spiridonovka Street (1933-34) and the Yauzsky Boulevard apartments (1936-1941). In 1938, he designed and managed the construction of a typical Stalinist apartment block in Nizhny Novgorod (Oktyabrskaya Street), which earned him an honourable posthumous mention in the "30 years of Soviet architecture" edition in 1949.

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Moscow, Russia
archibald, May 3rd, 2011
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