| Summary: | Konstantin Melnikov (1890 -1974) is unquestionably one of the outstanding architects of the 20th century ; in spite of the fact that he fell silent early, leaving behind only limited work that was insufficiently publicized, and restricted almost exclusively to Moscow, the city of his birth in which he spent nearly his entire life and which did not appreciate him. He was raised in humble circumstances, but enjoyed an excellent education.0In the late 1920s, at the peak of his career, he had the opportunity to build a house for himself and his family in Moscow, in which he was then able to live until the end of his life. This house, a memorable symbiosis of almost peasant like simplicity and extreme radicalness, is one of the most impressive, surprising and probably most enigmatic works produced by 20th-century architecture. Its simplicity is only outward; in reality this is a highly complex work which links together the elements of architecture explicitly and inextricably, which takes a clear and completely autonomous stand and which, in a way that little else has done, raises the question as to the nature of genuinely architectonic thinking. In essayistic form the book attempts to follow the paths laid out in the architect's work from the perspective of an architect.
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