His avant-garde position, however, didn’t sit well with the Soviet authorities, and from the 1940s Chernikhov withdrew from his practical work.
The Russian constructivist architect, graphic artist and theoretician had long studied the elements and laws of composition, publishing several books on the subject, and teaching students enrolled in the Research and Experimental Laboratory of Architectural Forms and Methods of Graphic Art – a course he established in the late 1920s as an alternative model to architecture and design work. It is instead a meticulous analysis drawn by Iakov Georgievich Chernikhov, and you might now assume that it is a Cyrillic S. It seems like a very complicated way of drawing a C.Īctually this is not a plan. Marked in black, and identified by pasted up letters, these points look a bit like constellations on a star map. These subdivisions serve as the origin points for circles of various diameters that seem to define the curvature of the letter, and for diagonal lines whose purpose is at best obscure. It is positioned on a grid of 60 squares (10 × 6), each unit potentially divided into a further six. To me it also looks a bit British, because it only has that single serif, while a French modern C, for example, might have two, top and bottom. Its thick and thin parts are distributed along a vertical axis, rather than a diagonal one, so in typographic terms it is a modern C.
A rather normal looking C, a bit condensed perhaps. Pen, red and black ink on paper, 305 × 210 mm. By Adrien Vasquez Iakov Georgievich Chernikhov (1889–1951), design for a letter C (or possible Cyrillic S), c.1940.