Website address: igoryawein.ru
All materials collected on the site belong to the personal archive of Igor Yavein and will subsequently be included in Oleg Yavein's book, during the preparation of which this resource appeared.
Igor Georgievich Yavein, 1903-1980
So, let's talk about the architect. Igor Yavein, a student of Alexander Nikolsky, went down in history with innovative methods of designing transport structures. In the competition for the building of the Kursk railway station in Moscow in 1932, for the first time in the history of Soviet architecture, he interpreted the station as a junction for various types of transport - from the metro to the airfield on the roof. In the project under the motto "Complex of seven modes of transport" the station appears as a multi-level structure, whose architecture both shapes the movement and is formed under its influence. In this competition, Yavein received the second, highest, prize - the first was not awarded. This project was far ahead of the needs of the 1930s and 1940s and seemed to some to be completely utopian. But in 1964, Igor Fomin recognized Yavein's project as software for transport architecture, and Igor Yavein himself in the 1960s and 70s returned to many of his ideas from his early years.
Choice of profession
Igor Yavein was not a hereditary architect, he was born into the family of an epidemiologist, professor of the Imperial Clinical Institute, Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, Georgy Yulievich Yavein and Polixena Nestorovna Shishkina-Yavein, who was an active public figure and chairman of the Russian League for Equality of Women. Oleg Yavein, who wrote a detailed biography of his father for the site, believes that the cult of service to Science and progress that existed in the family subsequently found a visible embodiment in architecture, becoming the moral basis of the creative method: the idea of Progress and a kind of cult of the natural principle in man, and this complex symbiosis was naturally transferred to life and art. Yavein found this symbiosis in the architecture of the avant-garde, or rather, he understood this architecture for himself."
Igor Yavein did not follow in the footsteps of his medical father and entered the LIGI (Leningrad Institute of Civil Engineers), in his first years at the workshop of Professor Andrei Olya. In his third year, he meets his main teacher - academician of architecture Alexander Nikolsky, a prominent representative of the avant-garde and a bearer of an acutely individual creative method. According to Oleg Yavein, Father always called Nikolsky the Teacher with a capital letter.
“Time was then compressed, the years were experienced as epochs, and educational work sometimes became iconic, programmatic,” writes Oleg Yavein about the period of his father's studies from 1923 to 1927. Somehow, at the end of his studies, Nikolsky sets the task for young Yavein to inscribe a tram stop in a narrow triangle of tracks with the words "Come on, get out!" And the student makes a magnificent sketch that sharply embodies the dynamic image. Later, this hidden dynamics and rhythmic movement will become the hallmark of all his transport facilities. The project of the Museum of Agriculture (1927) clarifies his own creative method, which Alexander Vesnin would later call "new organic architecture". Remaining a constructivist, Igor Yavein prefers not to split or break volumes, highlighting functional blocks, but to create them within a single and continuous, fluid form.
Competition for the Kursk railway station in Moscow / 1932
This competition became an important milestone in the creative biography of Igor Yavein: it was in the competition project of the Kursk railway station that he first announced the "idea of flows", the development of which the architect later took up in his dissertation and embodied in subsequent projects. Even in his thesis "Leningrad-Central Station" Yavein began to work out the idea of a transport structure as a complex interchange hub, the shaping of which stems from the calculated patterns of the movement of various streams. According to Oleg Yavein, the Kursk railway station appeared as a "multilayer bridge over the tracks with a roof-deck and tentacles of ramps, passages, entrances, escalators, an image that anticipated one of the directions of development of the architecture of transport structures."
“It was not just an idea. The structure, functional diagrams, external appearance of the building were worked out by the father seriously and fundamentally, - recalls Nikita Yavein. - What was written in the book he published in 1938 is more than modern. Even today, not everyone understands that the station is not a house, but a shell for transport and passenger flows, a hub for transfers from one mode of transport to another ….
The design of railway stations becomes the main line in the work of Igor Yavein. In 1930, under the influence of "leftist" painting, an experimental competition project for a railway station in Novosibirsk appeared - a very modern-looking hypercube-like building that hides traffic flows divided at different levels.
Constructivism after constructivism
Igor Yavein allowed himself to remain a constructivist even after the onset of the era of Stalinist neoclassicism. The program project of this period (1933-1941), which Oleg Yavein called “constructivism after constructivism”, was the Svirstroi residential building in Leningrad, one of the last “specialist houses”. He received this order, winning a competition in 1932, but by the time of construction in 1938, the neoclassical style was already dominating. Nevertheless, the house remained inherently avant-garde - an asymmetric plan with a powerful arc of the facade, "taken out masses" at the corners filled with balcony niches, the absence of "unemployed" columns and "excessive monumentality of forms", as the author himself said, clearly indicated his kinship with the 1920s and 1930s.
The era of neoclassicism still leaves an imprint on the work of a convinced constructivist. In 1945, Yavein won the competition for a railway station in the city of Kursk - presenting its building as a triumphal arch at the entrance to the city, then not yet restored. It is with the victorious symbolism that the classical symmetrical construction, the solemn and powerful structure of forms, is associated. On the same Moscow-Kursk railway during the years of post-war reconstruction, a whole series of standard stations for 50 and 100 people, designed by Igor Yavein, appeared.
But already in the competitive project of the station in Veliky Novgorod, for which the architect receives the first prize in the same year as for the Kursk station, he again manifests himself as a vivid heir of the avant-garde, this time, as Oleg Yavein writes, fused with "archaic" forms original Novgorod-Pskov architecture. He uses the archaic, explaining this by the fact that in post-war Novgorod, the architect, in fact, remained at the disposal of the same materials and construction technologies as 600 years ago. But these forms conceal a deliberately asymmetrical, avant-garde construction of volumes, explained by the presence of functional features and connections. For this work, Yavein's friends called him "a constructivist who went into the Novgorod underground."
Stadium on Krestovsky Island: Nikolsky and Yavein
A. S. Nikolsky's grandiose project - the stadium and the Primorsky Victory Park on Krestovsky Island - was partially completed before the war; due to the architect's illness in 1952-53, it was suspended. Then the Teacher invites his student - Igor Yavein - to take part in the completion of design work on the second stage of construction. Yavein joins the team of authors, performs design studies based on the Teacher's motives and in every possible way resists attempts to change his plan. Oleg Yavein remembers this period well. “My father helped Nikolsky with the design of the Kirov stadium when Nikolsky fell seriously ill. I, still quite small, sat next to me and drew the same stadium …"
The continuity of generations
In the 1950s – 1970s, Igor Yavein again turned to the design of "expanding stations", but now the theme of flows is merging with the ideology of the era of industrial construction. DSK products are introduced into projects, opportunities for expansion and transformation are laid. In 1960, Yavein presented the "avant-garde" project of the Leningrad Sea Station for the competition, three years later he took part in the competition for the station and the square in the city of Sofia. The imagery of this project will be reflected later in the station, built at the Latvian station Dubulti of the Baltic Railway, which Igor Yavein is already designing together with his son Nikita. The station, which served three types of transport at once - railway, bus and river - was completed by 1977; the elastic arc of its canopy on the tracks is very effective. Then a similar motive will be found in the projects of "Studio 44".
The charm of the father's personality was enormous, - recall Oleg and Nikita Yaveyny, so their own choice of profession was determined by itself. The diploma that Nikita Yavein was doing at LISS was, in his words, a continuation of the ideas set forth by his father.
Igor Yavein's book "The Architecture of Railway Stations" was published in 1938, and the provisions on the influence of flows on the architecture of transport structures outlined in it have become the defining doctrine in the architecture of railway stations up to the present time.
