Avant-Garde as Method: Vkhutemas and the Pedagogy of Space, 1920–1930

With her groundbreaking book Avant-Garde as Method, first published in 2020, architect and historian Anna Bokov offered the first scholarly exploration of art and technology education in the Soviet Union. This new, revised and expanded edition reflects the latest findings of Bokov’s ongoing research on the Higher Art and Technical Studios in Moscow, commonly known as Vkhutemas, and their pedagogical program. It features rich additional visual material that has been newly discovered in various archives since the publication of the book’s first edition. Vkhutemas was the first school to implement mass art and technology education, which was seen as essential to the Soviet Union’s dominant modernist paradigm. It 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 shows how this came to be articulated in architectural and urban projects within the school’s advanced studios.