Petr Dmitrievich Baranovsky was a renowned architect and restorer of ancient Russian architecture. He founded the first open-air museum in Russia in Kolomenskoye and the museum named after Andrei Rublev at the Andronikov Monastery.

Born in 1892 in Dorogobuzh to a peasant family, he graduated from the Moscow Construction School in 1912 and the Moscow Archaeological Institute in 1918. During World War I, he worked on the construction of fortifications on the Western Front.

In 1921, Baranovsky organized his first expedition to the Russian North, and he conducted a total of ten such expeditions. Throughout his life, he studied hundreds of monuments of folk architecture from the White Sea to Azerbaijan. During the anti-religious campaign, he worked on the restoration of the Kazan Cathedral on Red Square, which had been in disrepair since 1918. His approach to restoration, which involved restoring the original appearance of buildings and removing later additions, often drew criticism, but at that time it was one way to preserve monuments from destruction.

Baranovsky developed a method for reconstructing lost forms based on remnants of brickwork. At the Assumption Church of the Boldin Dorogobuzh Monastery, he was the first to replace rotting wooden structures with reinforced concrete. Thanks to his efforts, the Golitsyn Chambers in Moscow, the Church of Peter and Paul in Smolensk, and the Church of Paraskeva Friday in Chernihiv were restored.

Petr Dmitrievich passed away on June 12, 1984, at the age of 92, leaving behind numerous studies on the history of architecture and restoration techniques. He is buried alongside his wife Maria Yurievna at the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. In 2017, his archive was opened. Memorial plaques bearing his name have been installed at the Palace Gates of Kolomenskoye and on the walls of the Krutitsy Metochion.