THIS PROFILE WAS SPONSORED BY ART FORMS ARCHITECTURE
Getting his start
Grigori Fateyev was just 18 years old when he arrived in the United States from St. Petersburg, as Russia was just opening up to the world. He’d studied theater set design at home, and carried with him to this country a set of passions — a love of literature, a talent for drawing, and a hunger for narrative — but hadn’t yet landed on his own creative medium.
It turned out to be architecture.
Once he started hunting around for educational opportunities that didn’t require the kind of money a young immigrant didn’t have, Grigori heard about Cooper Union in New York City. The school was founded in the 19th century by industrialist and inventor Peter Cooper, whose endowment, anchored by the land beneath the Chrysler Building, was designed to provide fully-funded professional education to the children of working people by covering 100% of tuition costs. Cooper Union gave Grigori …
