Ivan Zholtovsky - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Zholtovsky was married twice and left no children. Since 1920 he lived in a 19th-century Stankevich House in Voznesensky lane. He died of pneumonia at the age of 92. As soon as he died, his widow, pianist Olga Arenskaya, was evicted from the house (in 48 hours,) his art and antiques collection was dispersed. His widow survived Zholtovsky one year.

Zholtovsky's creed was that architecture and construction process are indivisible; separation of architect from construction management reduces art to draftsmanship. Yet at the same time his work on reducing construction costs and evaluating new technologies in 1950s spelled the demise of profession in the USSR. This work, pushed forward in January 1951 by Nikita Khrushchev (then City of Moscow party boss), paved the road for a switch from masonry to prefab concrete in later 1950s. Zholtovsky workshop proposed various prefab concrete drafts, mixing new technologies with stalinist exterior; this line of architecture never materialized: Khruschev announced his war with "architectural excesses" in November 1955, just when the concrete industry acquired enough capacity for mass construction. Zholtovsky's last apartment block (Prospect Mira, 184) was stripped of "redundancies", and in ten years that followed, architecture separated from construction management and folded down to city planning and engineering.