Lev Vladimir Goriansky (1894–1967) also known as LVG, was a Russian Empire naval officer, American architect and artist. Early life Goriansky was born in Kharkov, Ukraine, the second son of six children (Uri, Lev, Nicholas, Olga, Alexis, Benjamin) to Vladimir Goriansky and Anna Savitch. His father was an engineer and later appointed by Emperor Nicholas II as President of the Chamber of Control in Poltava. His mother's family was titled and owned a large country estate in the Ukraine. From an early age Goriansky was gifted and excelled in drawing. In 1910 at the age of sixteen he entered a competition to study for two years at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg and was accepted. While studying art at school he lived with his uncle, Dr. Goriansky who had an apartment in the Winter Palace adjacent to the Hermitage Museum, allowing the young student time to investigate and appreciate many of the great works of the world. Naval officer In 1914 at the beginning of World War I, Goriansky entered the Russian Naval Academy to train as an officer. Upon graduation he was assigned to the Russian cruiser Rurik (1892) of the Baltic Fleet. During the upheavals of the 1917 Russian Revolution, and after a murderess mutiny aboard his ship, Goriansky made his way towards Poland where he was stopped and placed into a detention camp. He would later manage to escape and return home to Kharkov before it fell in the revolution. He bid his parents farewell, and joined the loyal Black Sea Fleet in Sebastopol, where he would serve aboard the cruiser Kagoul as a lieutenant under Admiral Osteletsky. During his travels in the Navy he made a stop in Constantinople, where he visited Haghia Sophia, which he would later write about. While stationed in Bizerte, he took the opportunity to board an American freighter and work his way to America, which would become his new home. Architect Nicholas Roerich gave Goriansky his first job in America by helping remodel an old brownstone house which would become the Nicholas Roerich Museum. Roerich would later recommend Goriansky enrolling in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he did in January 1922 and received his B.S. in Architecture in January, 1924. He found two good friends while studying there in Prof. William Emerson and Prof. Jacques Carlu, a French professor of art and design. While working part-time at