Vkhutemas’ Relevance Today
Vkhutemas, or the Higher Art and Technical Studios, restructured as Vkhutein, or the Higher Art and Technical Institute, in 1927, was a Soviet school that operated between 1921 and 1930.1 It evolved from autonomous Free State Art Studios created just after the Bolshevik revolution.2 Vkhutemas was a design school within the wider movement of early Soviet avant-garde architecture. Its backing ideology, leftism, can seem irrelevant with the bitter infighting of the far left and recent electoral failures of the center left, and it failed in reaching many of its goals.3 However, the school and the movement it represented had important ideas about social relations and architectural space that are relevant in 2020.
Vkutemas was one of many avant-garde, modernist design schools that developed in the 1920’s. These schools shared new ideas about how to live, work, and build, with both each other and a more general audience.4 The best of Vkhutemas’ ideas included the promotion of a lifestyle of equity, the lack of exploitation, community, creativity, and self-directed, holistic learning, as well as spaces that encouraged this lifestyle.
The lifestyle that Vkhutemas thinkers promoted is sorely needed today; rising income inequality, the fracturing of social relations across demographic lines, and a common narrative of dominant societal stagnation or backwardness all signal this need. It would also be beneficial to reintroduce their way of teaching today, in a time where a balanced liberal arts education has lost much of its value because of the neoliberal valuing of profit over the search for truth and justice.
Two prominent Soviet architectural organizations, Asnova and the O.S.A., were connected with Vkhutemas.5 Asnova focused more on the spatial aspects of architectural theory, while the O.S.A. focused more on the social and political theory that backed their architecture; the O.S.A. was more influential and published a journal much more regularly.6 The work of members of both groups should inspire today’s designers.
Asnova members included Konstantin Melnikov and Nikolai Ladovsky.7 Melnikov designed several innovative workers’ clubs, designed to stimulate creativity and culture in the face of overcrowded living conditions, as well as his own flexibly-planned, cylinder-shaped house.8 Melnikov’s work shows that innovative design with modern materials can coincide with the creation of space that fosters social equality and progress. Ladovsky was the founder of Asnova and a teacher at Vkhutemas/Vkhutein for the entirety of its existence, and he taught a course called “Space”, which focused on finding the objective rationality of architectural forms that fulfill human necessities.9 Ladovsky’s ideas are as relevant today as they were in his time; whether one thinks there is objectively good or bad architectural form, the ways spaces are constructed impact the way people feel about and relate to them.
A prominent member of the O.S.A. was Moisei Ginzburg.10 Ginzburg led a project to design experimental collective workers’ housing in the late 1920’s. The goal of this housing was to help the Soviet populace transition to more communal ways of living, while also economically using limited space and designing pleasant spaces.11 Ginzburg and his team took public input into account in their designs.12 Ginzburg’s final design for a realized project, the Narkomfin Building, included communal, laundry, residential, and daycare spaces, although only the first three were actually built.13 Ginzburg supported maintaining private space while fostering a more communal living experience.14 Ginzburg’s ideas should inspire designers in today’s increasingly isolating society to encourage socialization among neighbors in affordable housing, although the cost-cutting measures he utilized may not be needed.
Vkhutemas was designed to foster a more equitable and creative program of architectural study, which would inspire ideas about a more just society. Students were taught for free, and people from underprivileged backgrounds, regardless of previous academic or artistic performance, studied there.15 Students were encouraged to create new artistic and architectural forms, instead of simply copying old ones.16 Students were also allowed to choose who taught them, at least during the pre-Vkhutemas period of Free State Art Studios.17 Vkhutemas students were all required to take an introductory course, which spanned two years until 1926 and spanned six months afterwards. This course gave them basic knowledge, before they specialized, in a wide range of forms of art: architecture, painting, sculpture, woodworking, metalworking, ceramics, graphics, and textiles.18 Vkhutemas teachers and students created many papers, projects, manifestos, and exhibitions.19 The school allowed free debate within its halls.20 The democratic, cooperative, and wide-ranging academic nature of Vkhutemas is a model for today’s design schools.
Some of the ideals of Vkhutemas were deeply flawed, so revitalization of the school’s ideas should be done with caution.
The school and wider movement sprouted from, tied itself with, and embraced Leninism,21 an ideology based on the dubious principle that a self-chosen vanguard party should lead the path to an equal society. This misguided ideology ironically led to the suppression of the movement by the second leader of that vanguard, the totalitarian Stalin.22 In fact, the total rejection of past architectural forms by some in the school and movement led to a reactionary movement that harkened back to classical and older Russian forms, which eventually gained Stalin’s favor.23
The embrace of modern design materials and the lack of focus on environmentalism by Vkhutemas has not aged well. The very industrial materials and methods they embraced24 have been criticized as, at best, tools of the oppressive capitalist system they opposed and, at worst, incompatible with just society. Their lack of focus on the natural world has been shown to be misguided, as the fight against climate change, the loss of habitat and biodiversity, and the unjust use of natural resources has become a warranted rallying cry of today’s leftists who pursue sustainable urban planning.
A final aspect of the legacy of Vkhutemas should be celebrated and brought back today, but only with caution. The teachers and students at Vkhutemas were visionaries, who often designed projects that were not feasible in the 1920’s Soviet Union.25 It is important to promote projects like these to inspire technological progress and hope for the future. However, if a revival of the ideas of Vkhutemas will succeed, it needs to be grounded in the practical problems that prevent social and economic equity today.
Footnotes
Bokov, 2017; Ovsyannikova & Shukhov 2013, p. 23
Adaskina 1992, p. 284; Bokov, 2017
Kopp 1970, pp. 12, 71
Kopp 1970, p. 26; Ovsyannikova & Shukhov 2013, p. 26
Kopp 1970, p. 73
Kopp 1970, p. 76, 86
Kopp 1970, p. 86
Kopp 1970, p. 78, 116
Bokov 2019, pp. 21, 23; Ovsyannikova & Shukhov 2013, pp. 24-25
Kopp 1970, p. 86
Ginzburg, as quoted in Kopp 1970, p. 135; Movilla Vega 2020, 2
Kopp 1970, 92; Movilla Vega 2020, 2
Movilla Vega 2020, p. 9
Ginzburg, as quoted in Kopp 1970, p. 141; Movilla Vega 2020, p. 9-11
Bokov, 2017
Adaskina 1992, p. 285; Ovsyannikova & Shukhov 2013, p. 23
Adaskina 1992, p. 284
Adaskina 1992, p. 286; Bokov 2017
Adaskina 1992, p. 287, 289; Kopp 1970, p. 98; Ovsyannikova & Shukhov 2013, p. 26; Vronskaya 2012, p. 46
Bokov, 2017
Bokov, 2017
Bokov, 2017
Kopp 1970, pp. 5, 10-11, 25-26
Kopp 1970, pp. 70-71; resolution at the first OSA conference, as quoted in Kopp 1970, p. 95
Ovsyannikova & Shukhov 2013, p. 25; Vronskaya 2012, pp. 50-51
References
Adaskina. N. 1992. The Place of Vkhutemas in the Russian Avant-Garde. In The Great
Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932 (pp. 282-293). Guggenheim Museum.
Bokov, A. 2017, June 19. Institutionalizing the Avant-Garde: Vkhutemas 1920–1930.
Bokov, A. 2019. Rationalizing Intuition: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space. Defining
the Architectural Space | Rationalistic or Intuitive Way to Architecture, 15-29. https://www.academia.edu/40852171/Rationalizing_Intuition_Vkutemas_and_the_Pedagogy_of_Space.
Kopp, A. 1970. Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917-1935.
Thames & Hudson.
Movilla Vega, D. 2020. Housing and Revolution: From the Dom-Kommuna to the Transitional
Type of Experimental House (1926–30). Architectural Histories 8(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.264.
Ovsyannikova, E. & Shukhov, V. 2013. Phenomenon of the Russian Avant-garde. Moscow
Architectural School of the 1920s. docomomo 49(2), 22-27.
Vronskaya, A. 2012. Two Utopias of Georgii Krutikov’s ‘The City of the Future’. In DISTANCE
AND CITIES: Where do we stand? (pp. 46-54). London School of Economics and Political Science. https://architecture.mit.edu/history-theory-and-criticism/publication-old/two-utopias-georgii-krutikov’s-city-future.
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