Vladimir Steiskal

Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Steiskal was born in Moscow on 1 December 1927. He studied at the Moscow Architectural Institute, where he was taught by the architect Boris Mezentsev, and graduated in 1953 with a diploma project on the theme of a high rise building.

After graduating he joined Workshop No. 13 of Mosproekt, the Moscow city design institute, which was headed by Mezentsev. He worked there for many years, rising from an ordinary designer to chief project architect and deputy head of the workshop. From the mid 1950s he designed new residential districts in south eastern Moscow, including Tekstilshchiki, Novye Kuzminki, Lyublino and Vykhino, with their schools, shops and other everyday infrastructure.

A few days after the Tashkent earthquake of April 1966 he led a group of architects and engineers from Workshop No. 13 to the Uzbek capital. Within weeks they had produced the technical documentation for rebuilding, and Steiskal went on to design micro districts in central Tashkent and in Chilanzar, adapting the buildings to seismic conditions, soils and the local climate. For this work he and his colleagues received the Hamza State Prize of the Uzbek SSR. In Moscow he designed the Palace of Pioneers and Schoolchildren on the shore of the Lyublino pond, with a teaching block, a children's theatre for 800 people and a sports hall with a pool.

In the early 1970s he was appointed deputy head of the Mosproekt-1 directorate, and from 1982 to 2009 he was its head, continuing after it was reorganised as the joint stock company Mosproekt in 1993. Buildings and complexes he worked on as author or co-author included the Hotel Kosmos (1976 to 1979), the Zenit cinema, the cosmonauts' housing in Ostankino, the Institute of Management complex in Vykhino, the Slavyanskaya and Iris hotels, a hotel on Sokolnicheskaya Zastava Square, hotels on Kievsky Station Square, the Smolensky Passage shopping and office centre, the Sberbank headquarters, the tax inspectorate headquarters and the group of buildings on Kashirskoye Highway on the site of the apartment block destroyed in the 1999 bombing. He also worked on housing on the Rubtsovskaya Embankment and the Maryinsky Park district.

He was a member of the Union of Architects of the USSR from 1957, a doctor of architecture and a professor.

Colleagues remembered him as a man of high professional culture and fine artistic taste who combined attention to architecture with a talent for organisation and a willingness to take responsibility for large projects. Few details of his private life were published.

Vladimir Steiskal died on 19 October 2026 at the age of 98. His death was announced by the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences, of which he was an honorary member, under the heading Heavy loss. The academy said he had made a significant contribution to the look of Moscow in the second half of the twentieth century and offered its condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. The cause of death was not made public.

Steiskal's work is part of the daily surroundings of millions of Muscovites, from the mass housing districts of the south east to hotels such as the Kosmos. The academy wrote that his legacy lives on with the city, in its districts, buildings and spaces that have become part of the memory of several generations of Muscovites. His leadership of Mosproekt for almost three decades spanned the late Soviet period and the transition to a market economy.