(b Simbirsk [formerly Ul’yanovsk], 7 Feb 1862; d ?1918). Russian architect, designer and teacher. He studied at the Institute of Civil Engineers in St Petersburg from 1883 to 1888, and then in 1890 he went to Moscow, where in a brief, 15-year career he went on to execute more than 60 buildings, as well as designing decorative objects for mass production. His first buildings there are examples of late historicism. The Korobkov House on Pyatnitskaya Street and the Geyer Almshouse in Krasnosel’skaya Street, for example, display an eclectic blend of method, have a rich plasticity of volume, a slightly exaggerated sculptural quality in the architectural forms, and appeal to the legacy of Renaissance, Baroque and Romanesque architecture. From the late 1890s, however, Kekushev began to work in the Russian version of the Art Nouveau style (Rus. modern). He was one of the style’s pioneers in Russia and one of its leading exponents in Moscow, although some features of his earlier historicist works, such as accentuated plasticity, extensive and weighty forms and fidelity to Baroque and Romanesque motifs, continued to appear in his work. This is the case with a series of private residences (1898–1903), such as the List House (1898–9), Glazovsky Lane, the Kekushev House, on Ostozhenka, and the Nosov House (1903), Vvedenskaya Square, with their complex but static compositions, made up of independent volumes and large-scale, emphatically heavy forms.

• Kekushev, Lev (Nikolayevich)
  • Oltarzhevsky, Vyacheslav
  • Russia, §III, 2(iii): Architecture, 1830s–1917