USSR / RUSSIA

Rimma Aldonina

Architect, poet, singer, and children writer, Aldonina was one of the most successful and multi-sided Soviet architects, whose legacy includes design projects as well as singing in the satirical ensemble of women-architects Reisshinka, of which she was a long-term leader.

Rimma Aldonina

Rimma Andreeva

A native of Uzbekistan, where she studied and practiced architecture, Rimma Andreeva worked in several cities in Russia and Kazakhstan before moving to Minsk in 1964, where she focused on the planning of microdistricts.

Klavdia Butova

Butova was the member of the Steering Committee of the Union of Soviet Architects. In addition to her architectural work, she was a renowned popularizer of architecture, who gave numerous public lectures. She was also a painter (her work was shown in exhibitions of paintings of the Union of Soviet Architects) and poet.

Bella Etchin

Based at Mosproekt, Bella Etchin led the development of Nagatino valley, Moscow, during the 1960s and multiple construction projects in the center of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, during the 1970s. She was married to celebrated Soviet architect Boris Mezentsev.

Halina Alexandrovna Gurjanowa

Halina Alexandrovna Gurjanowa was a Soviet-Polish architect and researcher. She worked in Poland as well as in Russia, often together with her husband E.A. Goldzamt.

Kira Kartasheva

Trained as an architect, Kartasheva became the head of sociological research in TsNIIEP Zhilishcha, “the sector of sociological research and prospective housing problems” and later received a professorship at the Moscow Institute of Architecture.

Tamara Katsenelenbogen

Tamara Katsenelenbogen specialized in the design of public buildings and urban planning. She worked in Latvia and Russia.

Iryna Khachatrants

A construction engineer by training, Khachatrants made a successful academic career in the field of the organization of production of standardized building elements and their assembly. She was honored as a distinguished construction worker of Belarus in 1974.

Yevheniya Kyrychenko

Ukrainian and Russian architect and planner active in the 1930s, Kyrychenko designed a factory-kitchen in Kyiv before becoming the head of the Design Department of Kamchatka Joint-Stock Company in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Russia.

Maria Lebedeva

Maria Lebedeva was an artist living and working in Belarus and Russia. She participated in several exhibitions and practiced graphic and applied arts.

Oktyabrina Lebedeva

An architect and planner who spent her career at Mosproekt institute in Moscow, Lebedeva gained fame as a lead singer of Reisshinka satirical ensemble of women-architects, in which she participated between 1950s and 2007.

Anna Oltetsian

Oltetsian spent her career in the workshop of the luminary of Azerbaijan architecture Mikael Useynov, with whom she designed several iconic buildings in Baku, including hotels Azerbaijan, Absheron, and Moskva.

Alexandra Petushkova

Immortalized in Sergey Gerasimov’s film Love of Mankind (1972), Alexandra Petushkova, a specialist in panel construction, was one of the architects of the celebrated House of New Everyday Life in Moscow, which is also featured in the film.

Tatyana Safonova

Based at Lengiprostroy institute in the 1960s-1980s, Safonova participated in the award-winning planning and design of Shevchenko, a new uranium-mining town on the Caspian sea in Kazakhstan.

Elizaveta Shipkova

Elizaveta Shipkova was the coauthor of her more famous husband’s Alexander Shipkov’s visionary projects for the polar north. Their story was adapted for Sergey Gerasimov’s film Love of Mankind (1972).

Vasilisa Shylnikouskaya

A recipient of several highest architecture awards in Belarus, Vasilisa Shylnikouskaya worked as an architect in Novosibirsk, Russia, and as a landscape architect and planner in Minsk, in addition to authoring a study of historic architecture in Veliky Ustyug, Russia.

Anna Ter-Avetikian

Anna Ter-Avetikian, bon 1908 in Yerevan, became the first female architect of Armenia, graduating from the Technical School of Yerevan State University (YSU) in 1930. She worked as an architect for several decades and designed many buildings across the country. For her work, she received a couple of awards.

Aksana Tkachuk

One of the few female architects to be awarded the title of distinguished architect of Belarus, Tkachuk designed several prestigious public buildings in Minsk and was the chief artist and deputy chief architect of Minsk in 1977-1983.

Natalia Menchinskaya

Here you can find a link to the profile of Natalia Menchinskaya published in Arkhitektura SSSR in March 1979.