A master of architecture has left us – a great charismatic figure and lover of life, a man intolerant of dishonesty, falsehood, and bad taste, unafraid to be critical and to defend his own vision, even in times when a free and independent voice could cost one’s career – Valery Valentinovich Kanyashin. He passed away on the night of February 26-27, at the age of 73. He was still young, because for an architect this is no age at all.



I was fortunate to know him personally. Not for long, but still.

Perhaps, more than almost any of his fellow architects, Valery would have suited the famous aphorism by Groucho Marx: “I would never be part of a club that would have me as a member”. Valery was a respected professional and, for many, almost a cult figure – someone who, together with his colleagues at Ostozhenka, effectively reinvented modernism in Russia (the building of the International Moscow Bank on Prechistenskaya Embankment, the office centers on Trubnaya and 1st Brestskaya Streets, the residential complex Panorama on Klimashkina Street – all cornerstones of post-Soviet architecture).



He was the recipient of numerous awards and titles (from Adviser to the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences to laureate of the State Prize of the Russian Federation), a participant in countless ratings and rankings. He was readily invited to serve on competition juries, was a welcome guest at industry events, a sought-after speaker and publicist… Yet all of this seemed not to concern him, and perhaps even to tire him slightly.



Valery lived for architecture: he felt deeply the decline in the profession’s prestige, lamented its excessive commercialization, and at the same time remained “cutting-edge” to the very end – conceiving ideas, designing, negotiating, holding his ground. He quite literally radiated energy.



One of his last completed projects – the residential complex Headliner on Shelepikhinskaya Embankment – is a dignified (in the fullest sense of the word), witty (bordering on audacious) response to our contemporary obsession with high-rise construction. There, the skyscrapers are assembled into a kind of mega-set design that imitates a city skyline – an allegory of the future we fervently strive to hasten, without fully understanding why we need it in the first place.

Valery Valentinovich loved his friends, his colleagues, those who shaped his small world – and they loved him in return. He rarely stepped beyond its boundaries and was not a particularly public person. All the more valuable, then, were his infrequent public reflections in recent years.



One would like to recall the closing lines of his recent article for the portal Design Mate: “An architect always works to someone else’s brief, unless he is designing a house for himself. There may be more freedom or less freedom, but authorship always remains yours. Imagine an architectural competition: all participants receive the same assignment – the same external brief. Yet the result is several entirely different architectural works. It is the architect’s personality that determines the outcome, no matter how strict the constraints or how much time he spends discussing the project with the client. An architect’s creative freedom lies within himself”.



Personality indeed determines much – if not everything. Valery was, without doubt, a vivid and strong personality, a man who left a tangible mark on the course of Russian architecture’s development, who did much for Ostozhenka – both the place and the company. This is how he will remain in our memory.