Meet the Curbed Young Guns Semifinalists: Vladimir Radutny

Curbed Young Guns, now in its first year, aims to identify promising up-and-coming talent (35 and under) in the fields of architecture, interior design, and urban development. For the next few weeks, Curbed National will run individual stories on each semifinalist; the inaugural class of Young Guns will be announced in mid August. In the mean time, though, here's a look at a semifinalist based in Chicago:

What struck Young Guns panelist Mark Peters about the work of fellow Chicago architect Vladimir Radutny is its breadth, ranging from furniture design to institutional commissions to slick renovations to private, ground-up homes. "I always have an appreciation for architects who show an ability to shift scales in their work," Peters says.

"An ability to shift scales" might be an apt description of Radutny's path at large. Born in what is now Ukraine (and was then the Soviet Union), Radutny, 34, emigrated to the United States in 1989. "My parents and I are refugees, we're Russian Jews," he says, "and at that point a lot of Russian Jews were fleeing the Soviet Union to various locations." He was raised in Chicago from age 11 on, spent a couple of years at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, transfered to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spent his junior year studying architecture at a program "in the stables of the Chateau Versailles," graduated from U of I, and earned his M. Arch there, as well. From there, Radutny moved to London with his then-girlfriend (now his wife), where he joined Boyarsky Murphy Architects. He worked for Nicholas Boyarsky, whose father, Alvin, had created the Architectural Association—"that's where Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid basically came out of," Radutny says—and Nicholas' wife, Nicola Murphy.

More background, plus some recent AIA Chicago wins.>>