Iakov Chernikhov was born on the 30th of December, 1889 in Pavlograd, Ekaterinoslav Governorate (now Dnepr Region of Ukraine) and was the 12th child in the family. In 1904 he left Pavlograd for Odessa and entered the Odessa Art School that was then affiliated to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. To earn his living, young Chernikhov had to work as a docker, carton factory worker, passepartout maker, retoucher / photographer, and as an architect's assistant for the design and construction of the Odessa Commercial and Industrial Exhibition, due to which he early on acquired a good command of various graphical skills.


In 1914, having graduated from the Art School, he moved to St. Petersburg (from August 31st, 1914 — Petrograd, from January 26th, 1924 — Leningrad) and entered the Academy of Arts, the faculty of painting, simultaneously taking courses of the Higher Pedagogical Academy. In 1916, Iakov Chernikhov switched to the faculty of architecture and in 1925 graduated as a certified architect / artist. Among his tutors were such classical school educators as Kiriak Kastandi and Gennady Ladyzhensky in Odessa, Vladimir Beklemishev, Dmitry Kardovsky, Georgy Kosyakov, Ivan Fomin and his main mentor, academician of architecture Leonty Benois — in Petrograd.


Iakov Chernikhov launched his independent career in drafting art and graphics in 1912; the same year he began his teaching practice, which was to last all his life. In 1927, Iakov Chernikhov established his own Science and Research Experimental Laboratory for Architectural Forms and Graphical Studies, where he got actively involved, together with his students and assistants, in experimental and design work. These graphical fantasies about the architecture of the future, created mostly in the daytime, are exhibited in one space with miniature architectural fairy tales, a journey of a kind into the architecture of past eras Chernikhov used to draw at night.


Having joined the Constructivism movement relatively late, when the height of experimental investigations was largely over (the late 1920s — early 1930s), Chernikhov published his books of architectural fantasies that made him famous worldwide and earned him the title of 'Soviet Piranesi': Fundamentals of Modern Architecture (1929–1930), Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms (1931), and Architectural Fantasies. 101 Compositions (1933). Exquisitely designed and printed, they have become a source of inspiration to many generations of architects. In 1933 an exhibition of Iakov Chernikhov's works 2222 Architectural Fantasies opened at the Anichkov Palace, under the orders of Sergey Kirov.


Then, in the early 1930s, when the new country only started to take shape, architectural fantasies of Iakov Chernikhov seemed unrealizable, and to many professionals who knew what it took to realize a conceptual project, they looked like a complete utopia, in spite of the overall spirit of renewal and strive for a better future that prevailed in architectural circles. Maybe, that's why, when Iakov Chernikhov's Fundamentals of Modern Architecture were published, the academician of architecture Alexander Dmitriev addressed him with the words inscribed on the walls of the main pavilion of the Arts and Industry Exhibition in Darmstadt: "Show us your world, artist, which never existed and will never be."

Architect Andrey Chernikhov