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31 Vkhutemas: Art School of the Perpetual Revolution Review of Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930 at the Cooper Union, April 25–May 5, 2023
HGA Architects and Engineers, Westwood Hills Nature Center, St. Louis Park, Minnesota, 2020.
Weiss/Manfredi, cofounded by Marion Weiss (MArch ’84), received two Merit Awards in the 70th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards, for the Longwood Gardens West Conservatory and the La Brea Tar Pits project. Peter MacKeith (MArch ’85), dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, has been selected to chair the advisory panel for a new memorial on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., to honor those “who have served and sacrificed in the ongoing war on terrorism.” Richard W. Hayes (MArch ’86) received a fellowship from the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH). He published a new essay on E. W. Godwin in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens and spoke on the subject at New College Oxford, the British Institute for Interior Design, and the Universities of Paris, Tours, and Toulouse. Hayes was a featured speaker at a roundtable for recipients of the Brunner Grant at the AIA New York Chapter. He also gave the keynote talk at Kean University’s annual conference “Thinking Creatively” and the Peter Blundell Jones Memorial lecture at the University of Sheffield. Newick Architects, founded by Craig Newick (MArch ’87), received a 2022 AIA Connecticut Design Award in the Commercial, Industrial, Educational, and Multi-Family Residential Design category for the ‘r kids Family Center, in New Haven. Craig Copeland (MArch ’89) has been elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in the Object Two category. A renovation to the Bruce Museum, in Greenwich, Connecticut, was recently completed by EskewDumezRipple, where Steve Dumez (MArch ’89) is principal and design lead. The project includes a 42,000-square-foot wing providing expanded collection storage, permanent and changing exhibition spaces, and a new public entrance lobby and lecture hall. Thomas Frechette (MArch ’89) has been promoted to senior associate at Pickard Chilton. He is currently coleader on the design of the CoStar Group’s new campus in Richmond, Virginia.
1990s Patricia Brett (MArch ’90) recently curated the exhibition Sculptural Imprints for the KINK Contemporary gallery, in Cleveland, featuring the work of seven printmakers exploring texture and space. Brett also taught workshops at the Art Students League of New York, Zygote Press, and the Morgan Paper Conservatory. Her work was
Fall 2023
recently acquired by MetroHealth Hospitals, in Cleveland, for its permanent collection. Marc L’Italien (MArch ’90), design principal in the San Francisco office of HGA Architects and Engineers, has won a 2023 AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) Award for the Westwood Hills Nature Center, in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. The project also earned a Zero Energy Certification from the International Living Future Institute in 2022. The building’s flexibility and ability to handle visitor flow allowed it to open safely in 2020, when most museums were still closed. Juan Miró (MArch ’91), a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, delivered lectures at the 2023 AIA Conference on Architecture, the Dallas Architecture Forum, AIA San Antonio, and in Mexico City this spring. He published an article in Architect’s Newspaper advocating against windowless dorm rooms, prompted by increased use of this room type at UT Austin. His firm, Miró Rivera Architects, received a Texas Medal of Arts Award, a 2023 Design Award from the Texas Society of Architects, and an AIA Austin Design Award. Mo Zell (MArch ’98) has been named president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) for 2023– 24. Zell was also appointed interim dean of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s new College of the Arts and Architecture in April. She has served as interim dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, which is now part of the College, since 2022. Edgar Papazian (MArch ’99) has accepted an appointment as vice president of AIA Peconic for 2023. Khoury Vogt Architects, cofounded by Erik Vogt (MED ’99), is a recipient of the ICAA’s 2023 Arthur Ross Award for Excellence in the Classical Tradition.
2000s Grace Ong Yan (MArch ’00), together with Andrew Hart and Elena Nestico, all faculty members at the Thomas Jefferson University College of Architecture and the Built Environment, won a $75,000 grant to create a public art piece celebrating Black history in Huntington, New York. The piece, “Redemption,” will be composed of three steel panels laser cut with quotes from prominent Black figures from the town, including Jupiter Hammon, John Coltrane, and Booker T. Washington. Ron Stelmarski (MArch ’00) was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in 2022 in the Object One category, focused on design. His work has been recognized for
The exhibition Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930, co-curated by Anna Bokov (PhD ’17) and Steven Hillyer at the Cooper Union, retrieved the history of an astounding institution, Vkhutemas (acronym for Higher Art and Technical Workshops), from its “near eradication from the history of modernism,” according to Hillyer’s curatorial statement. Founded in Moscow in 1920, this design school for the masses was an early product of the Bolshevik Revolution, established as soon as Lenin and Trotsky took power and undertook educational reform. The timing alone speaks of strong ties, and mutual support, between the visual arts and political spheres — a moment when propaganda was a recognized constituent of cultural discourse. From the present standpoint, considering the divide separating politics from the academy and the arts, it is remarkable to look back at this synthesis of political and intellectual effort. The mandate was both ambitious and indicative of the social transformations afoot. At a time when levels of education varied prodigiously, the school would be open to all, and up to 2,000 students enrolled at a time. Coming into being at a moment of profound artistic iconoclasm, the school was formed as the stratification of society and the canons of figural representation were deemed equally defunct. In the immediate wake of total and violent social upheaval, the curriculum established at Vkhutemas would reject conventional methods of art production as well as its means: the fixed studentinstructor hierarchy was jettisoned, gender equality was fostered, and education was free. The institute drew together pioneers of new modes of artistic creation such as Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Tatlin, and Kazimir Malevich, many of whom had previously been experimenting and teaching at the Vitebsk Art School, headed by Marc Chagall, and later by Malevich. The exhibition channeled pragmatic and profound questions addressing the pedagogy of the school. How do you create a common set of tools among students with entirely different degrees of prior education? How do you pursue new objectives and instill new techniques while banishing traditional emotive, compositional, and representational tropes? A new language was elaborated across creative disciplines, melding the technical, scientific, and inquisitive registers. As the school opened its doors, students were inducted into the freshly developed “foundational disciplines” that had been shaped by a subcommittee of the Institute of Artistic Culture (Inkhuk). The work on display — photographs, records, and recreations of Vkhutemas student projects by students of the Cooper Union — exhibited immense creativity, invention, and disciplinary overlap. Though the show was organized to present the work though different pedagogical ends in different areas (exercises, combinatorics, constructions, instruments, projects), the artifacts suggested fluid exchange across studios. Indeed the collective reset brought on by the Russian Revolution of 1917 manifested in the pedagogical program of the school and ultimately in its creative output: the Foundational Courses were required of all of the students, and the school sought to recognize all of its members on equal footing.
The school’s porous environment comes through in the exhibition. In Rodchenko’s “Composition on a Plane” graphics studio, the fundamental formulas of type setting and print layout were cast aside and the page was reintroduced as a two-dimensional expanse, or a spatial proposition. This work clearly anticipated and dialogued with the Constructivist compositions of his colleagues in the architectural studios, conveying the fruitful intermingling across disciplines promoted at the school. Grappling with what Bokov calls the “the role of collectivity in learning,” this environment offered a stark contrast to Western European academic models that marked divisions between the technical and the plastic arts. While the exhibition portrays an artistic idyll of creativity and equality, colder aspects of Taylorist production were also instrumentalized at the school. In the “combinatorics” section of the exhibition, the wall text offered a less egalitarian view of the student body in which an instructor tracks success though quantitative output. Perhaps employed for their “objective” criteria, such systems reveal rigid means of evaluation, foretelling other tallying regimes that would define the USSR. Yet this undercurrent stands in vivid contrast to the many photos of students and instructors in their studios, brimming with excitement. When Lenin died in 1924, the trajectory of the new Communist state was irrevocably shifted. While the mourning nation grappled with elaborate political maneuvering, Vkhutemas had lost its most powerful ally. By 1927 Trotsky was forced into exile, and Stalin, who remained in power, preferred a monumental Beaux Arts architecture. Before the school’s closing in 1930, the institution continued to form designers while sustaining bruising interventions from the Stalinist state. In its ten-year run, the school had construed its avant-garde thinking into a functioning institution. Before it fell into anonymity — atomized and unappreciated in Stalin’s USSR, and unspoken of in the West — the school’s achievements were recognized triumphantly in Paris, at the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, where it was awarded the Grand Prix. — Violette de la Selle (MArch ’14) is a critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a founding member of Citygroup.
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