Melnikov was born into a peasant family on the northern edge of Moscow and reached architecture through a patron who noticed a boy who drew. His entire built career fits into a single decade. Between 1923 and 1933 he produced the Soviet pavilion for the Paris exhibition of 1925, five workers' clubs in and around Moscow, four bus garages and one house — his own. Critics file him with the Constructivists and he shared their clients, but he never accepted the group's discipline, preferring geometric figures pushed until they became strange: interlocking cylinders, a fan of seating cantilevered over a street, a diagonal parking ramp. When Stalinist neoclassicism closed the argument in the mid-1930s he refused to convert, and spent forty years painting portraits and teaching.
