Architecture Lab

The founding of Vkhutemas — the Higher Art and Technical Studios — had a profound impact on the development of 20th-century architecture. This key creative institution was established in 1920 on the basis of the Stroganov School of Art and Industry and the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture.

Vkhutemas developed a unique two-tiered educational system. The formal-analytical method, which emerged from the experimental work of Russian avant-garde artists in the 1910s and 1920s, became the foundation for abstract exercises in disciplines such as Space, Volume, Colour, and Graphics.

The school comprised eight departments: architecture, ceramics, printing, painting, sculpture, textiles, woodwork, and metalwork. However, the core of its experimental search was the foundation course — a propaedeutic programme where students of all specialities studied general principles of colour perception and expression, fundamentals of spatial thinking and form generation, rhythm, and composition.

In autumn 1920, on the architecture faculty of Vkhutemas, architect and rationalist theorist Nikolai Ladovsky established the United Left Workshops (Obmas), aimed at training a new generation of architects. The pedagogical and creative framework of Obmas was based on a psychoanalytical method, founded on two principles: recognising space as the main architectural material and emphasising the primary importance of how architecture is perceived by humans.

In 1927, in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), Yakov Chernikhov created and implemented his own system for teaching graphic and spatial disciplines — the "method of compositional invention," in which graphics served not only as a means of expression, but also as a tool for invention. According to Chernikhov, the graphic language was destined to become the principal means of international communication in the future.

Architectural graphics, which in Chernikhov’s interpretation became an independent field of architectural creativity, served both as a medium of expression and a method for inventing new forms. The principle of combinatorics, so characteristic of Chernikhov’s compositions, laid the foundation for their translation into virtual space.