Childhood and School Years. Family and Friends

Vladimir Ginzburg was born July 23, 1930 in the family of the world-famous functionalist architect Moisey Ginzburg. He lived with his parents in the famous Narkomfin House on the Novinsky Boulevard, designed and built by his father, in a communal flat. The friend of Vladimir Ginzburg’s, Yuri Platonov, would later on recall how as children they would go together carrying their milk cans to the communal kitchen to get carry-out dinners for their families. In addition to high school, Vladimir Ginzburg went to an art school. There he made friends with the future director of the State Tretyakov Gallery (1980-1992) Yuri Korolev and the future muralist Evgeny Ablin. In the summer camp, Vladimir Ginzburg met Alla Kireeva, who later on married the famous Soviet poet Robert Rozhdestvensky, with whom Vladimir Ginzburg also maintained friendly ties.

Not so long ago, new details of the Ginzburg architectural galaxy became known. Vladimir Ginzburg’s son, Aleksey, discovered in Minsk 120 projects, signed by a certain Jacob Ginzburg and built from the 1890’s to the early 1920’s. Jacob Ginzburg, Vladimir Ginzburg’s grandfather and Moisey’s father, was an architect or civil engineer, and a very successful one, judging by the fact that he was able to send all of his children to study abroad. In Minsk, they found the tenement that Jacob Ginzburg designed and built, and then lived in one of its apartments.

In 1946, when Moisey Ginzburg died, Vladimir was only sixteen, and when his mother died he was eighteen. He was evicted from the Narkomfin House. For some time, Vladimir Ginzburg lived at the place of his mother’s cousin, Raisa Kantsenelson, whom Moisey Ginzburg had brought over to Moscow from Tbilisi. She studied the history and theory of architecture in the All-Union Research and Development Institute of the Theory of Architecture and Town Planning. Then the young man moved to a room in a communal flat. In that flat, he met the future author Anatoly Zlobin.

The choice of a profession became for Vladimir Ginzburg a natural decision. However, in 1948-1949, the Soviet Union embarked on the so-called “anti-cosmopolitanism campaign”, and he was not admitted to the Moscow Architectural Institute. However, he was still able to enter the Moscow Civil Engineering Institute, enrolling at the Moscow Architectural Institute a year later. Vladimir graduated from Moscow Architectural Institute in 1956; his professor was Mikhail Sinyavsky (the designer of Moscow Planetarium, and a colleague of Moisey Ginzburg’s – editorial note). Vladimir was in the same course with Yuri Grigoryev (the future deputy of the Chief Architect of Moscow Alexander Kuzmin), and Vsevolod Talkovsky.

Early Career. Brutalism

After he graduated from the institute, for some time Vladimir Ginzburg worked in Giprosport, and then he worked in Mosproject for thirty years. He became the leader of the architectural studio when still a very young man, at the age of 29. He headed Studio 19, and later on, when it was merged with Studio 10, he headed Studio 10. In 1958, he got married and in 1959 his daughter Elena was born. In 1968, Vladimir Ginzburg got married a second time, to Tatiana Barkhina, and a year later his son Aleksey was born.

Just like many of the alumni of Moscow Architectural Institute, in the late 1950’s Vladimir Ginzburg chiefly designed community centers of “clubs” as they were called in the Soviet Union. Together with other Moscow architects, he took part in restoring Tashkent after the Great Earthquake, designing the housing sector.