Vkhutemas: Art School of the Perpetual Revolution

Review of Vkhutemas: Laboratory of Modernism 1920–1930 at the Cooper Union, April 25

May 5, 2023

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 inventive responses to culture and context, elevating the public realm, and galvanizing communities with architecture of enduring aesthetic, environmental, and social value. Throughout 26 years of practice, the last 10 as design director of the Perkins & Will studio in Dallas, Stelmarski has worked with the goal of building new projects that honor the past, such as the award-winning Pittman Hotel, an adaptive-reuse project in Dallas. His work on the 277-acre Fair Park Master Plan, in Dallas, inspired his vision for the city that was included in Watershed Urbanism, at the European Cultural Centre’s exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. His Singing Hills Recreation was recently called “The Best New Building in Dallas” by Mark Lamster, architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News. Other recent projects include the Eastside El Paso Recreation Center and the Baylor Scott & White Health Administration Center.

— Violette de la Selle (MArch ’14) is a critic at the Yale School of Architecture and a founding member of Citygroup.

MAD Architects, the office of Ma Yansong (MArch ’02), recently completed Timeless Beacon, an installation in Guangdong. The China Philharmonic Concert Hall, in Beijing, is nearing completion, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, in Los Angeles, is expected to be completed in 2025. The firm has unveiled renderings of its first project in South America, Qondesa, which will be the tallest building in Quito, Ecuador, and won an international competition for the design of Changchun Longjia International Airport Terminal 3, in China.

Dream the Combine, founded by Jennifer Newsom (BA ’01, MArch ’05) and Tom Carruthers (MArch ’05), received a 2023 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York. The practice also received a 2023 Rome Prize Fellowship.

Max Worrell (MArch ’06) and Jejon Yeung (MArch ’07) were profiled in T Magazine for their Springs Artist Studio on Long Island. Their firm, Worrell Yeung, received the Interior Design NYCxDesign Award in the category Social Impact, for Canal Projects, an art space in a landmarked cast-iron building on the corner of Canal and Wooster Streets, in SoHo, Manhattan.

Molly Wright Steenson (MED ’07) has been named president and CEO of the American Swedish Institute, in Minneapolis.

2010s

Andreea Ion Cojocaru (MArch ’10) was recently featured on the panel “Placemaking Across Realities,” hosted by Spectra Cities at Cornell Tech.

Members of the class of 2013 were thrilled to return to campus at the end of April for their ten-year reunion. The weekend featured a series of events planned by Altair Peterson (MArch ’13) and lecturer Antonia Devine (MArch ’13) that included sponsoring a Friday 6 on 7 for current students; a conversation with Dean Berke on the school’s evolution and priorities; a fierce badminton tournament; and dinners and drinks at old favorites including Rudy’s and Bar pizza. More than half of the class came, from as far as Berlin, London, and the West Coast, as well as

Brooklyn. Everyone may or may not have ended up at the Pink House for a Paprika! party on Friday night. The class of 2013 is already looking forward to its 20th reunion.

London-based firm Neiheiser Argyros, cofounded by Xristina Argyros (MArch ’13), completed the renovation of a Victorian terrace house, including the addition of a basement-level stepped courtyard.

Rob Bundy (MArch ’13) relaunched Bundy Architecture, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 2022.

Owen Howlett (MArch ’13) has been promoted to associate principal at Pickard Chilton. He is currently leading the design teams for several large-scale, mixed-use master plans, including significant developments such as Le Coeur, a complex repositioning of existing and new buildings on one of the most prominent sites in Düsseldorf, Germany, and CoStar Group’s new corporate campus in Richmond, Virginia.

Melissa Shin (MArch ’13), founder of Shin Shin Architecture, shared her experiences in the profession with AIA Los Angeles in honor of AAPI Heritage Month. Shin Shin Architecture received the 2022 AIA|LA Presidential Honor Emerging Practice Award and a 2022 AIA|LA Residential Architecture Award.

Brittany Utting (MArch ’14) and Daniel Jacobs (MArch ’14), of HOME-OFFICE, presented the lecture “Time Machines for a Future Climate” at the Cooper Union on March 23.

Elisa Iturbe (BA ’08, MEM ’15, MArch ’15) and Stanley Cho (MArch ’15), in collaboration with Alican Taylan, curated the exhibition Confronting Carbon Form, shown at the Cooper Union from March 21 to April 16, 2023. It featured original design work by the curators exploring the spatial roots of the climate crisis. Iturbe and Cho contributed the essay “Transgressing Immutable Lines,” on the potentials of community land trusts for addressing social and political challenges, to In Common, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, and Arc en Rêve Centre d’Architecture, in Bordeaux, France.

Madelynn Ringo (MArch ’16), founder of retail and experience design firm Ringo Studio, was featured in a profile in AN Interior focusing on her career trajectory and work for cookware company Our Place.

Skender Luarasi (PhD ’18) and Gary Huafan He (PhD ’20) edited the book Contemporary Perspectives on Architectural Organicism: The Limits of Self-Generation (Routledge, 2023), offering a variety of critiques of the Modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science.

Tara Marchelewicz (MArch ’18) served on the jury for the 2023 Mississauga Urban Design Awards.

Zelig Fok (MArch ’19), assistant professor of architecture at Ohio State, received the Charles E. MacQuigg Award for Outstand- ing Teaching from the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture, part of the College of Engineering.

Maia Adele Simon (MED ’19) presented the talk “Breaks and Continuities: Spatializing Transition in Astana,” at Citygroup in New York on February 4, coinciding with the exhibition Aesthetics from the End of History: Liberalization, Privatization, and Other Ghosts of the ’90s. Simon is currently a PhD student in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture at MIT.

2020s

Andrew Economos Miller (MArch ’20), Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow at the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University, curated the exhibition Refuse // Repose, shown at the school’s Armstrong Gallery.

Laura Pappalardo (MED ’21) received a Gruber Fellowship in Global Justice from the Yale School of Law. She will be working with the Partindo do Chão Coletivo research platform, a collective formed by non-Indigenous and Guaran í researchers and architects, coordinated by professor Glória Porto Kok at Escola da Cidade, in São Paulo, to improve the quality of housing in Tekoá Pyau village, one of six Guaraní villages at the foot of Jaraguá peak. The project will research and document traditional construction techniques of the Guaraní Mbya; map Tekoá Pyau village housing conditions and the need for basic infrastructure such as sanitation and access to water; provide technical guidance for São Paulo zoning laws and produce a document as an instrument of negotiation with the city to prevent further real estate expansion on the Jaraguá Indigenous territory; build two housing prototypes; and launch a fundraising campaign to renew existing houses in the village.

Gustav Kj æ r Vad Nielsen (MArch ’22) participated in the UIA World Congress of Architects in Copenhagen on July 5, as part of the panel “Next Gen: Transition into Sustainability Practices.”

Juanita Castaneda Norena (BA ’23) won the Library Map Prize for her senior thesis in urban studies, “The Myth of Solidarity: The Formalization of Segregation and Externalization of Class through the Estate System in Cali, Colombia,” advised by Joyce Hsiang (BA ’99, MArch ’03). The prize “recognizes students whose senior essays or projects make use of one or more maps or charts in substantive ways.” The selection committee noted that this “exceptionally creative essay” skillfully integrated archival and newly created maps, scholarly research, and collage to examine social issues. Estrato, a housing-based socioeconomic stratification system in Colombia, was intended to create solidarity by distributing utility costs based on income. As the jury noted, Castaneda Norena’s “visual methodology” enables the reader to understand the history of Cali, its present-day issues, and how estrato has instead furthered inequality and segregation.

Clare Fentress (MArch ’23) received the Avery Review Essay Prize for her article “Staff Needs: The Spaces of Hospice,” which uses the Southern Connecticut Hospice, in Branford, as a case study to examine the architectural aspects of care.

Josh Greene (MArch ’23) and Christina Chi Zhang (MArch ’23) were nominated for Metropolis magazine’s Future100 Architecture Graduate Cohort. Chi Zhang was also named the Harry der Boghosian Fellow at the Syracuse University School of Architecture for the 2023–24 academic year. The fellowship allows early career practitioners the opportunity to spend the year developing a body of design research based on an area of interest while teaching.

Chucho Martínez Padres (BA ’23) curated an exhibition of George Kubler’s archive as part of the Senior Exhibit Fellowship at Yale Library. The Study of Things: George Kubler in Latin America is on view in the Sterling Library Exhibition Corridor from May 1 to October 8, 2023.

Kapp Singer (BA ’23) received Yale’s John Addison Porter Prize, one of Yale College’s major prizes in the humanities, for his senior thesis Media Against the Fire, or How to Save the Forest for the Trees advised by Keller Easterling. Singer graduated summa cum laude from the History/Theory/ Urbanism track of the architecture major and was the only student in Yale College honored with the Exceptional Distinction in the Major award.

Nicole Niava (MArch ’24) received the 2023 John Belle Travel Fellowship. Her proposal was selected from a field of 30 applications by students from 16 schools.

Tom Hsu (MArch ’24) was awarded the 2023 Kohn Pedersen Fox Traveling Fellowship. Yale Environmental Humanities grants for the summer of 2023 were awarded to Austin Ehrhardt (MED ’24), for “Black Homesteads of the New Deal”; George Papamatthaiakis (MED ’23), for “Horizons after Tourism”; associate professor Elihu Rubin (BA ’99), for “New Haven Brownfields Opportunities Flyer”; and Kevin Yang (MArch ’24), for “New Haven, Revisited: An Anthology.”

Alumni Events

On June 8 more than 100 alumni — residents of the Bay Area and those attending the AIA Conference on Architecture — gathered at the University Club of San Francisco. Representing class years between 1973 and 2023, they heard updates on the school from Dean Berke, including news on recent events and successes in fundraising for scholarships, as well as how the school is adjusting after the pandemic.

The Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning, and Design (ISAPD), founded by YSoA alumni Anjelica Gallegos (MArch ’21) and Charelle Brown (BA ’20), is a recipient of the 2023 Fulcrum Fund grant cycle for the First Future Project. The annual grant program was created and is administered by 516 ARTS as a partner in the Regional Regranting Program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The First Future Project encompasses a range of programming targeted to sustaining the endeavors of the ISAPD and expanding on Indigenous architectural principles firmly rooted in the tracking of natural phenomena and celestial events, specifically the fall equinox. Programming includes a built installation, community art contribution, maps and drawings, a public festival, a design competition, and an online community book. The built installation is set to show in New York in the fall in collaboration with the Center for Architecture and partners.

Yale Women in Architecture (YWA) is an inclusive community led by graduates of the Yale School of Architecture that promotes excellence and equity in the field of architecture and related professions. Earlier in the year YWA hosted a general meeting at Sage & Coombe Architects, in New York, bringing together a range of members both digitally and in person to connect. In June YWA hosted a celebration of the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. Bringing students and YWA members together at Atelier Cue, in New Haven, the event stimulated discussion around future modes of practice and sustainability in the built environment. During the next academic year the YWA hopes to connect and support alumi and current students through an intergenerational exchange of experiences and knowledge. YWA fosters women’s leadership and entrepreneurship in all facets of the ever-evolving profession of architecture and urbanism. Learn more at www.yalewomeninarchitecture.org.

If you would like your news to be featured in a future issue of Constructs, please send it via email to constructs@yale.edu. Constructs also keeps an eye on alumni press releases and stories elsewhere on the web, but a direct email is still the best way to make sure your news is included.