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(1) Ivan (Aleksandrovich) Fomin
(b Oryol, 3 Feb [NS] 1872; d Moscow, 12 June 1936). He was a son of a postmaster and grew up in Riga. At his second attempt he was admitted to the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg, in 1894, but he was suspended for participating in student unrest. For a time he worked for the leading Russian exponent of Art Nouveau, Fyodor Shekhtel’, in Moscow. He returned to the Academy in 1905, eventually finishing his diploma in architecture in 1909. His graduation prize was a study trip to Egypt, Italy and Greece. Although a convinced classicist from this period onwards, exemplified by his Polovtsev Mansion (1911–13), Petrograd (now St Petersburg), Fomin preserved his interest in the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk and experimented with garden city design, for example at Laspi (1916–17), a resort in the Crimea. He completed around 50 designs by 1917, including a station, a bank and a museum. Following the establishment of the Soviet state, Fomin formed a small group of classicist architects, including Aleksandr Gegello and Grigory Simonov (1893–1974), and elaborated an architectural style he believed to be appropriate for the new political conditions. Early examples of the resulting ‘red Doric’ style, as it came to be known, include the designs (1919) for a Workers’ Palace and the Korshch Theatre, both in Petrograd. Characterized by plain stone surfaces, colonnades, courtyards and regimented columns, the style establishes an atmosphere that is both severe and solemn. This adherence to a classicist architectural language led him, however, into confrontation with other architects, such as the Constructivists, who considered the work of Fomin and the Renaissance Revival architect Ivan Zholtovsky too symbolic of the pre-revolutionary world and not sufficiently forward-looking.
Part of the Fomin family
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