Teaching Space: Experimentation at VKhUTEMAS

Following the October Revolution of 1917, VKhUTEMAS – the state art and technical school active in Moscow from 1920 to 1927 – implemented a pioneering educational model conceived to serve the needs of Soviet society. From its inception, the school was organised into eight art and production departments: Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Graphics, Textiles, Ceramics, Wood, and Metalworking. Their collaboration was further strengthened in 1923 with the introduction of a two-year Basic division, which comprised four courses: Graphics, Colour, Volume, and Space – the last being the most experimental. For the past forty years, the Soviet scholar Selim O. Khan-Magomedov has served as the principal source of historical knowledge about VKhUTEMAS. More recently, researchers such as Natalia Adaskina, Anna Bokov, Anatole Senkevitch, Luka Skansi, and Alla Vronskaya have expanded our understanding of the school’s operations. However, the broader implications of the Space course as a whole and its relationship with contemporary pedagogy remain relatively unexplored. Drawing on extensive research in public and private archives worldwide, this paper investigates the methods and sequence of avant-garde teaching employed for the Space course between 1923 and 1927. More than a century after its founding, VKhUTEMAS is exceptionally relevant to contemporary architectural education.