Aleksey Nikolayevich Beketov was born on February 19, 1862, in Kharkiv, although some sources indicate Kyiv, in the family of Nikolai Nikolayevich Beketov, the founder of physical chemistry and an academician of the Imperial Academy of Sciences.

He studied at the Kharkiv Real School and in the private art school of M. D. Raevskaya-Ivanova. He received higher education at the architectural faculty of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg under the guidance of professors D. I. Grimm and A. I. Krakau in 1882 and 1888. At the same time, he worked with the famous St. Petersburg architect M. E. Messmacher, participating in projects such as the palace of Grand Duke Mikhail Mikhailovich and the building of the State Council archive. He graduated from the Academy with a gold medal, defending his diploma project on the topic of a railway station at the seaside baths on the Black Sea.

Since 1890, Beketov taught at the Kharkiv Technological Institute.

In 1894, he was awarded the title of academician of architecture for the design of the Public Library building for one and a half million volumes, which has been named after Korolenko since 1921 and is the largest library in Eastern Ukraine.

Beketov significantly influenced the architectural appearance of Kharkiv, creating more than 40 buildings, especially in the Nagorny district and on Pushkinskaya Street, Myronositsky Lane, and Sadovo-Kulikovskaya Street.

His projects also included about 60 buildings in Crimea, Simferopol, Alushta, Kyiv, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinoslav, Lubny, Novocherkassk, Belgorod, Baku, Donetsk, and cities in the Donbas, such as Horlivka and Makeevka.

Beketov educated a generation of young architects from Ukraine, Russia, and the Soviet Union who studied at the Kharkiv Polytechnic Institute, the Institute of Arts, the Engineering and Construction Institute, and the Institute of Municipal Economy Engineers in Kharkiv. Among his students were architects A. N. Dushkin, Ya. G. Lichtenberg, and V. G. KrichEvsky.

He was married to Anna, the daughter of Ukrainian mining industrialist Alexey Alchevsky, who was an artist.

Aleksey Beketov passed away on November 23, 1941, in occupied Kharkiv.

He was buried in the city cemetery, where the Youth Park is now located. In the second half of the 1970s, before the cemetery was closed, his remains were transferred to the thirteenth city cemetery of Kharkiv on Pushkinskaya Street.

Beketov's archives are kept in the Central State Scientific and Technical Archive of Ukraine in Kharkiv.