Horodetsky

By Walter Kish

My office in Kyiv is located in a laneway called “The Passage” running off of Kyiv’s famed Khreshchatyk Avenue. From my office window I have an excellent view of a spirited bronze sculpture of Kyiv’s best known architect, Vladislav Horodetsky. It portrays a very dapper and distinguished man seated at a caf table drinking coffee. Tourists are constantly stopping and having their picture taken sitting in the invitingly empty bronze chair opposite Horodetsky.

Many of Kyiv’s most memorable buildings were the creation of this flamboyant and colourful character, including, the National Art Gallery, St. Nicholas Cathedral (better known as the Organ House), and the truly eccentric House of Chimeras opposite the Presidential Administration building. He was born in the small village of Sholudky in Vynnytsia oblast in 1863, of mixed stock that included Polish as well as Tatar ancestry. He got his professional training in Odesa and St. Petersburg. He traveled widely through Europe, Africa and the Middle East, absorbing the cultural and aesthetic influences of these varied cultures. 

Upon returning to Kyiv he began a productive career as an architect showing an incredible range of styles. The National Art Gallery, for example, is of classical Greek columnar design, while the church of St. Nicholas is distinctively Gothic. In contrast, his best known work, the House of Chimeras, is an exotic art nouveau creation that is truly unique. He built it as his own private residence and lavishly decorated its exterior with gargoyles and animal sculptures that include frogs, rhinos, elephants, deer, mermaids, eagles, crocodiles, fish and dragons. Although some claimed that the design was inspired by either madness or nightmares, in truth it was a tribute to his love for hunting, as he frequently indulged in safari hunting expeditions to Africa.

Aside from its singular architectural design, it is a remarkable feat of construction. Built astride a fairly steep escarpment, its top two floors open up unto Bankova Street and face the massive Presidential Administration building where President Yushchenko has his offices. The lower four floors descend down the side of the escarpment to the bottom where it abuts the Ivan Franko Theatre. It was built at the turn of the century between 1901 and 1903, when the experts of the day told Horodetsky that such a building was impossible to build on the given site. Horodetsky persuaded a friend, who was a mining engineer, to drill and install special piles to shore up the foundation. His innovations in construction also made him one of the first people in Ukrainian to utilize the novel development of reinforced concrete. 

At the same time that he was creating the House of Chimeras, Horodetsky was also building St. Nicholas Church. This soaring Gothic structure took ten years to build and was finally consecrated in 1909. During the Soviet era, the church was put to more mundane use as a warehouse, with radio antennas mounted on its tall spires. During the 1970s, the authorities, bowing to pressure from Kyiv’s intellectual community to better preserve its cultural heritage, renovated the church into an organ concert hall. When Ukraine finally became independent in the 90s, the church was returned to the Roman Catholic community, and it is once again a house of worship.

Horodetsky did not live long in his House of Chimeras. He sold it in 1913, and after the Bolshevik revolution he fled Ukraine for Warsaw and eventually ended up in Iran. There, he built numerous significant structures, including a palace for the Shah. He died in Tehran in 1930 and is buried there.

Unrecognized throughout the Communist era, Ukraine’s most famous architect was finally honoured by the newly independent government of Ukraine in 1996 when it renamed Karl Marx Street as Horodetsky Street, and erected the bronze sculpture that greets strollers in The Passage.