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Kamensky, Valentin (Aleksandrovich)
(b Tula, 29 Sept 1907; d 1975). Russian urban planner and architect. He graduated from the Institute of Communal Construction Engineers, Leningrad (now St Petersburg), in 1931. He came to prominence in the 1960s as the director and principal architect of the master plan of 1966 for Leningrad. He was faced with the contradiction between an urgently needed quantitative expansion of housing, and the preservation of the historic centre of the city. His solution, similar to the conclusions of numerous other design teams around the Soviet Union, was the development of fully integrated satellite communities (Rus. mikrorayon), beyond the main city. With the architect Aleksandr Naumov, he proposed a scheme, based on ideas from before World War II, that Leningrad should grow in an organic and coordinated manner away from the existing structural plan towards the shores of the Gulf of Finland and Vasilyevsky Island, where it would terminate in a sea port. This was to result in the construction of new boulevards flanked by extensive areas of high residential blocks, built of prefabricated, mass-produced elements and set in parkland. He also designed the 4000-seat Oktyabr’sky (October) Concert Hall (1967), Ligovsky Prospekt, Leningrad, and the Monument to the Defenders of Leningrad (1975; with Mikhail Anikushin and Sergey Speransky) in Victory Square, Leningrad, which both show a heroic and spectacular approach characteristic of Soviet architecture of the 1930s.
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