Vladimir Shukhov (Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov, Владимир Григорьевич Шухов; 28 August 1853 – 2 February 1939) was a Russian engineer, the inventor of the hyperboloid lattice tower and of steel gridshell and suspended roofs, and one of the most distinguished and versatile civil engineers Russia has produced. His best-known work is the radio tower on Shabolovka Street in Moscow, completed in 1922.[1][2]

His structures were first shown to the public in Nizhny Novgorod, the city on the Volga at the mouth of the Oka (called Gorky in 1932–1990). At the All-Russian Exhibition of 1896 he built the world's first hyperboloid tower and a group of pavilions roofed with steel lattice shells and membranes; the London weekly The Engineer called them "one of the few instances of original thought and design in the engineering exhibits".[1][3] The Nizhny Novgorod region still holds some of his most important surviving works: the lattice vaults of 1897 at the steelworks in Vyksa, the only surviving Shukhov lattice roofs in the world; the Vyksa water tower of 1933–1934, moved to a public park in 2025; and the 128-metre (420-foot) power-line tower on the Oka near Dzerzhinsk, the only multi-section hyperboloid pylon in the world.[4][5]

Engineer of the Bari office

Shukhov was born in the small town of Graivoron in the Kursk province, where his father was the town governor. He graduated with honours from the Imperial Moscow Technical School in 1876 and was sent to the World's Fair in Philadelphia to study American industry; he spent several months in the United States and met the chemist Dmitry Mendeleev there.[1][2] Back in Russia he headed the drawing office of the Warsaw–Vienna railway in St Petersburg, designing locomotive depots, and attended lectures at the Military Medical Academy; two years of studying medicine, he said later, acquainted him with nature's most perfect "structure", the human body.[1]

At the end of the 1870s Alexander Bari, an engineer who had returned from America, invited Shukhov to Baku, where for the Nobel brothers they built the first oil pipeline in the Russian Empire. In 1880 Bari founded his own technical office, later the Construction Office of Engineer A. V. Bari, with Shukhov as its chief designer and chief engineer; Shukhov settled in Moscow and specialised in metal structures.[1][2] "My personal life and the fate of the office were one whole," he later said.[1] He designed oil tanks, pumps and burners, patented a method of oil cracking in 1891 and a water-tube boiler that won a gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1900.[1] For the Volga he designed a new type of steel oil barge, calculated as a "floating beam": between 1884 and 1900 more than ninety were built under his direction, three quarters of all the barges then working in the Volga basin.[6]

1896: the debut in Nizhny Novgorod

The All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition opened beside the Nizhny Novgorod Fair in 1896 and was the largest of all the all-Russian industrial exhibitions held before the revolution.[7] Its calling card was Shukhov's lattice construction, for which he had applied for a patent earlier that year.[7][8] For the exhibition he built eight pavilions roofed with lattice shells, the first steel membrane roof — the round pavilion known as the Shukhov Rotunda — and the first hyperboloid tower.[1] The pavilions were built and owned by Bari's office: they covered a total of 302,700 square feet (about 28,000 square metres), of which 117,200 square feet were suspension roofs, and were rented to the exhibition and afterwards dismantled and re-erected elsewhere, which is why their bars were bolted rather than riveted. In May 1896 they came through "a severe gale, of almost hurricane violence".[3]

The Engineer described the principle in March 1897: instead of trusses and girders, "a lattice network of angle or Z-iron for arch roofs, and of flat bar iron for suspension roofs", made of bars of a single section, drilled to template and riveted together on site "without requiring any heavy scaffolding or lifting appliances". The magazine found that the method gave "a considerable advantage in prime cost over the usual mode of construction", especially for buildings that were not rectangular in plan, and judged it "one of the few instances of original thought and design in the engineering exhibits".[3] The historian of Russian architecture William Brumfield considers the two large pavilions of the Construction and Engineering Section "the most advanced use of metal-frame construction for their time and possibly the first use of a metal membrane roof".[2]

The water tower is built of angle iron bars crossing each other in the form of a rotary hyperboloid.

— The Engineer, 19 March 1897[3]

The tower was built of straight angle-iron bars set at an angle so that together they formed a curved, waisted surface — a hyperboloid of revolution — stiffened every nine feet by rings. It rose 87 feet (about 26.5 metres) to the tank, which held 5,000 cubic feet of water; a spiral stair inside a central pipe led to a viewing platform on top, and the whole tower contained only 35 tons of iron.[3] It supplied the exhibition with water and served as its observation deck.[9][10] After the exhibition it was bought by the industrialist Yury Nechaev-Maltsov and moved to his estate at Polibino (now in the Lipetsk region), where it was re-erected under Shukhov's supervision and still stands.[4][8] Shukhov protected the principle with a patent for an "openwork tower" (No. 1896, 12 March 1899); within a few years his cheap, light and quickly assembled water towers became popular all over Russia.[9]

Vyksa: the sail-like roof of 1897

A year after the exhibition Shukhov used a lattice shell of double curvature for the first time, over a rolling mill of the steelworks in Vyksa (Выкса), an old metal-making town of the Nizhny Novgorod region. The roof looked like sails filled with wind.[11] The vaults of the sheet-rolling shop, about 2,800 square metres, are still in place at the Vyksa works and, according to the plant's owner, are the only Shukhov lattice roofs surviving anywhere in the world.[4]

Vyksa also has one of the last towers built in Shukhov's lifetime. It was erected in 1933–1934 by the Stalmost trust, where he was then a technical consultant: 38.8 metres (127 feet) of straight steel rods in a hyperboloid, supplying water to an open-hearth shop.[4][10] Having lost its industrial use in the 1970s and survived a fire and attempts to pull it down, the federally protected tower stood inside the works, closed to the public.[12][10] In 2024–2025 the plant's owner, the United Metallurgical Company (OMK), took it apart into more than 500 pieces, restored them and reassembled the tower in Shukhov Park — a ten-hectare public space being created on the site of the first 18th-century ironworks of the Batashev brothers in the historic centre of the town, with a planned Museum of Metal — keeping about 95 per cent of the original metal.[13][4][10] It was the first relocation of a Shukhov tower in modern times, and the tower was unveiled in October 2025; in 2026 the project won the Grand Prix of the Architectural Heritage festival.[4][10][12]

The towers on the Oka (1927–1929)

After the revolution Shukhov took part in the state plan for the electrification of Russia (GOELRO). In 1927–1929 he designed and supervised the crossing of the Oka by the 120-kilovolt power line of NiGRES, the Nizhny Novgorod regional power station, near Dzerzhinsk: three pairs of multi-section steel hyperboloid towers, 128, 68 and 20 metres high, carrying the wires over a crossing about 1,800 metres long.[5][1][10] For the 128-metre towers he used the "telescopic" method he had developed for the Shabolovka tower: each tier was assembled on the ground inside the tower, raised into position and bolted to the top ring of the tier below.[5]

When the line was later rerouted, the four smaller towers were dismantled for scrap; the two tall ones were placed under state protection in 1997, but in 2005 the Oka washed away the bank under one of them, and it fell and was removed.[5][8] The remaining tower was also at risk; restoration began after the governor of the region, Valery Shantsev, sued its owner, the power company Nizhnovenergo. In December 2014 the Russian government declared it a monument of federal importance, "a monument of the period of the industrialisation of Soviet Russia".[8][5] In 2020 the grid company Rosseti Centre and Volga Region restored the tower, recreating lost parts of its base, strengthening the river bank with a promenade and fitting the lattice with about 23,000 LEDs; it reopened on 23 September 2020, the centenary year of the GOELRO plan.[14] It is one of only two surviving tall multi-section hyperboloid towers by Shukhov, the other being the Shabolovka tower in Moscow.[5]

In 2023 the Bank of Russia's redesigned 100-rouble note included a fragment of a Shukhov tower lattice seen from inside; the head of Dzerzhinsk, Ivan Noskov, who calls the tower the symbol of his city, noted that the two surviving towers, in Moscow and in Dzerzhinsk, are so alike that it is hard to say which of them is shown.[15]

Smaller towers of the region

Two more lattice towers survive in and near Nizhny Novgorod. In Koposovo, in the city's Sormovo district, a lattice tower built to Shukhov's design, a little over 20 metres high, stands on Kim Street; it is believed to have carried a water tank and served as a fire watchtower; it is a regional heritage site and in 2022 was transferred to the regional government for restoration. In the village of Lyakhovo a 14-metre fire watchtower of 24 steel rods and seven rings was built in 1935 on the model of Shukhov's towers by a team of local boilermakers led by Feoktist Tretyakov, paid for by the volunteer fire brigades of three villages; it was declared a regional heritage site in 2021 and restored in 2023–2025.[10]

Legacy

The Shabolovka radio tower, built in 1919–1922, became Shukhov's most famous work; its image was the emblem of Soviet television until 2002.[1] He was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1928 and an honorary member in 1929, the year he received the Lenin Prize. He died on 2 February 1939, aged 85, of injuries from an accident — a candle set his clothes alight as he worked at his desk — and was buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery.[1]

Almost 130 years ago the great engineer Vladimir Shukhov made a revolution in building thought, which the world learned of precisely from Nizhny Novgorod. Towers in Kobe, Zurich, Liberec, Sydney and Guangzhou have been built in the image of Shukhov's hyperboloid structures.

— Gleb Nikitin, governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region, 2025[10]

See also

Sources

  1. International Shukhov Foundation — "Vladimir Grigoryevich Shukhov", biography (in Russian) (archive)
  2. University of California Press (UC Press E-Books Collection) — William Craft Brumfield, The Origins of Modernism in Russian Architecture (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 25–28
  3. Grace's Guide to British Industrial History — The Engineer, 19 March 1897, "The Nijni-Novgorod Exhibition", pp. 292–293 (scan of the issue) (archive)
  4. United Metallurgical Company (OMK) — "The Shukhov tower is being restored and moved — for the first time in modern practice", press release, 2 July 2025 (in Russian) (archive)
  5. Interfax — "The Shukhov tower on the Oka has become a federal monument", 7 December 2014 (in Russian)
  6. International Shukhov Foundation — "Shipbuilding. Oil barges" (in Russian) (archive)
  7. Kommersant — "Engineer Shukhov's hyperboloids" (on the opening of the 1896 exhibition) (in Russian) (archive)
  8. Lenta.ru — "The Shukhov tower in Dzerzhinsk has been granted federal monument status", 8 December 2014 (in Russian) (archive)
  9. International Shukhov Foundation — "Hyperboloid structures" (in Russian) (archive)
  10. Nizhegorodskaya Pravda — Oksana Snegireva, "Everything is openwork: a journey to the Shukhov towers of the Nizhny Novgorod region", 21 October 2025 (in Russian) (archive)
  11. International Shukhov Foundation — "Lattice structures and industrial buildings" (in Russian)
  12. forma.spb.ru — "The Shukhov tower in Vyksa: a return" (Grand Prix of the Architectural Heritage 2026 festival), 23 June 2026 (in Russian)
  13. Expert — "How the water tower of the engineer [Shukhov] was restored and moved in the town of Vyksa", 12 November 2025 (in Russian)
  14. GiperNN — "Reconstruction of the Shukhov tower on the Oka completed in Dzerzhinsk", 24 September 2020 (in Russian) (archive)
  15. Administration of Dzerzhinsk — "The Shukhov tower is pictured on the 100-rouble banknote", 18 July 2023 (in Russian) (archive)