Joseph Karakis


Joseph Karakis was Soviet architect, urban planner, painter and teacher, one of the most prolific Kiev architects.
Author of dozens building that are now considered architectural landmarks, more than two-thousand schools
were built in the Soviet Union from designs created by Karakis, and overall there were more than four thousand buildings built from his designs.

Biography

Joseph Karakis was born on 29 May 1902 in the town of Balta, Ukraine, to Julius Borisovich Karakis, co-owner and a worker of a sugar factory in Turbin and Karakis Frida Jakovlevna. Joseph was the oldest child and had a younger brother David Julevich Karakis who has chosen to become a doctor, and was a colonel and chief of medical squadron during World War II.
From 1909 till 1917 Joseph Karakis studied at Vinnytsia realschule, while attending evening drawing classes of Abraham Cherkassky. In 1918, he worked as a painter decorator in Vinnytsia theater at Matthew Drak for the troupe of Gnat Yura, Ambrose Buchma and Marian Krushelnitskiy. In 1919 he joined the Red Army as a volunteer, where he served as an artist for the agitation train. Since 1921 he worked as an artist for the Vinnytsia Commission on Monuments and art of antiquity. He was responsible for the formation of the city museum's gallery and library from the collection of Princess Branitskaya's mansion in Nemyriv.
In 1922 he was admitted to the Institute of National Economy at the Faculty of Law. A year later he got admitted to Kiev Art Institute in the Faculty of Painting. During his studies he works as a theatre artist. At the same time, in 1925, as a result of an influence by James Steinberg, he transitioned from a third year of having art major to a first year in an architectural department. In 1926, while studying, he worked as a senior technician in the construction of the Kiev railway station with his teacher Alexander Verbitsky, then assistant to the design as well as the implementation of the Academy of Sciences and first in Ukraine house for doctor's families located on Big Zhitomir str. 17 in Kiev. In 1927, in a secret from their parents married Conservatory student of piano major Anna Kopman, who was considered one of the Kiev beauties.
In 1929 he graduated with an architecture major. Architectural design was taught by P. Aleshin, A. Verbitsky and V. Rykov. In 1931 he received an invitation to teach at the Kiev construction institute. Before the war, Karakis was an architect of various houses and public buildings, among which were the Jewish Theatre in Kiev, the National Museum of Ukraine and others. Since 1941 he was an associate professor of architectural design at KARI. During the war years he worked on the contraction of the heavy machinery factories in Rostankoproekt. From 1942 to 1944 Karakis worked as a chief architect of the Farkhad Dam, where he has designed the dam, diversion channels, machinery room as well as various housing projects.
After the war he worked in the Kiev Giprograde and Civil Engineering Institute, and from 1948, was chief of the institute of the art industry of USSR Academy of Architecture.
In 1951, after another ideological "cleansing", he was fired. He was the only person who championed the preservation of historical monuments during the period of "struggle with cosmopolitanism."
Since 1952 Karakis worked in the Giprograd on the model design. From 1963 till 1976 he was head of the Design department at the Architecture School in KievZNIIEP. In 1977, following the invitation of B. E. Yasievich, he joined for some time the Kiev Research Institute of History, Theory and prospective problems of Soviet architecture. There Karakis worked on development of the "Housing of the Near Future" prospect for building in Kiev.
Karakis died on 23 February 1988. He was buried at Baikovo cemetery beside his mother.

Projects

In Kiev:
In the city Begovat :
In the city of Kryvyi Rih:
In the city of Kharkov:
In the city Skhomorohi :
In the city of Komsomolsk:
In the city of Kramatorsk:
In the city of Lugansk:
In the city of Moscow:
In the city Voroshilovgrad:
In the city of Tashkent:
In the city of Chisinau:
In the city of Kramatorsk:
In addition:

Selected publications

Various people consider themselves to be students of Karakis. Most of them studied and worked with the architect during the period of 1933 to 1952. Several, later became famous Soviet and Ukrainian architects. among those people are: Anatoly Dobrovolsky, Abraham Moiseevich Miletsky, Yuri Aseev, Valentin Ezhov, Vadim Skugarev, Boris Zhezherin, Anatoly Ignaschenko, Viktor Chepelyk, Zoya V. Moiseenko, Boris M. Davidson, Yuriy Khimich and more. Some of his students later became writers, among them Viktor Nekrasov and Leonid Serpilin. One of the students is his daughter Irma Karakis, who later got a Ph.D. in architecture and became a senior researcher. She has long worked as head of an interior sector of KievZNIIEP.

In memory

During the 100 years celebration, the following items were released: