The groundbreaking new study on the early Soviet Union's Higher Art and Technical Studios, known as Vkhutemas, and their pioneering curriculum that has been a source of inspiration for generations of architects, designers, and artists until the present day

Throughout the 1920s and '30s, the Higher Art and Technical Studios in Moscow, more commonly known as Vkhutemas, adopted what it called the objective method to facilitate instruction on a mass scale. The school was the first to implement mass art and technology education, which was seen as essential to the Soviet Union's dominant modernist paradigm.

With Avant-Garde as Method, architect and historian Anna Bokov explores the nature of art and technology education in the Soviet Union. The pedagogical program at Vkhutemas, she shows, combined longstanding academic ideas and practices with more nascent industrial era ones to initiate a new type of pedagogy that took an explorative approach and drew its strength from continuous feedback and exchange between students and educators. Elaborating on the ways the Vkhutemas curriculum challenged established canons of academic tradition by replacing it with open-ended inquiry, Bokov then shows how this came to be articulated in architectural and urban projects within the school's advanced studios.

Named one of the Most Beautiful German Books 2021 and winner of the DAM Architectural Book Award 2021.

• A groundbreaking new study on the VkHUTEMAS and its pioneering curriculum
• Examines the way VkHUTEMAS challenged established canons of academic tradition
• Highlights their advanced explorative pedagogic approach of a continuous feedback loop between assignments and solutions and demonstrates the lasting significance of VkHUTEMAS' legacy
• Based on latest research in previously inaccessible archives and featuring numerous previously unpublished images and documents

Autorentext
Anna Bokov is an architect, urban designer, educator, and historian, teaching and researching as an Assistant Professor Adjunct at Cooper Union's Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in New York.