Vladímir Grigórievich Shújov (Grayvoron, Russian Empire, 28 August 1853 – Moscow, Soviet Union, 2 February 1939) was a Russian engineer, inventor and architect. He studied at the Imperial Technical School in Moscow, now Bauman Moscow State Technical University, graduating in mechanical engineering with a gold medal in 1876. That same year, he travelled to the United States as part of a Russian scientific delegation to visit the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where he met engineer and entrepreneur Alexander Bari.
Upon returning to Russia, he worked at the technical office of the Warsaw–Vienna Railway in Saint Petersburg. In 1878, he began collaborating with Bari on the development of facilities for the oil industry in Baku. In 1880, he became chief engineer at the technical office Bari had established in Moscow, where he carried out much of his professional work. During this period, he designed oil pipelines, steel storage tanks, oil transport vessels, steam boilers and industrial fuel-processing systems. In 1891, together with engineer Sergei Gavrilov, he patented a continuous thermal cracking process for petroleum.
Alongside his industrial work, Shukhov began researching steel structural systems for buildings, large-span roofs and towers. His early projects included the roof structures of the Upper Trading Rows in Moscow, now known as GUM (1889–1893). In 1896, he presented several pavilions with lattice and suspended roofs at the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition in Nizhny Novgorod, together with a water tower constructed from straight steel members forming a hyperboloid surface. He filed a patent application for this structural system in 1896, which was granted in 1899. It was subsequently used in water towers, lighthouses and other industrial structures.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he developed steel structures for buildings and infrastructure, including the roofs of Petrovsky Passage and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, as well as numerous railway and industrial facilities. He also contributed to the design and construction of hundreds of bridges and developed lattice structures for factories and large-scale buildings.
Between 1911 and 1912, he designed the Adziogol hyperboloid lighthouses near Kherson, in present-day Ukraine. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, he continued working on industrial and communications infrastructure. Between 1919 and 1922, he designed and built the Shabolovka radio broadcasting tower in Moscow, known as the Shukhov Tower, a 160-metre-high steel structure composed of six superimposed hyperboloid sections.
During the 1920s, he collaborated with architect Konstantin Melnikov on the structural development of several buildings for Moscow's public transport system, including the Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage (1926–1927) and the Novoryazanskaya Street Garage (1926–1929). He also designed steel towers for electrical transmission lines, including the hyperboloid structures built between 1927 and 1929 for the crossing of the Oka River near Nizhny Novgorod, and participated in the development of industrial facilities and oil pipelines across the Soviet Union.
In 1927, he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union and became an honorary member in 1929. He received the title of Hero of Labour in 1928 and the Lenin Prize in 1929, as well as recognition as an Honoured Worker of Science and Technology.
Vladimir Shukhov died in Moscow on 2 February 1939.
