Composition IV

Iakov Chernikhov was a constructivist architect and graphic designer born in Pavlograd in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) in 1889.

Chernikhov wrote many books highlighting his ideas and interests in the Russian futurist movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Russian Futurism rejected the past and focused on an interest in speed, machinery, industry and the destruction of academies, museums and urbanism.

Only a small number of Chernikhov’s projects were ever built and of those that were, very few survive. One of his surviving buildings is the tower of the 'Red Nailer' factory in St. Petersburg. Chernikhov was distrusted by the Stalinist regime leading the Soviet Union at the time of his work being produced due to his unique and avant-garde ideas.

Chernikhov “would retreat more and more into fantastic sketches as time went on—not as a blueprint for future building, but as an escape from the grim reality of Stalinist reaction. Utopianism was not wholly absent in Stalinist architecture; it was just displaced.”

This drawing is part of a series of compositional studies he made, and evokes the monolithic architecture of the Soviet Union.