Exhibition "VKHUTEMAS-100. Illuminators of tomorrow’s cities. Faculty of architecture"

Address: MUAR, st. Vozdvizhenka, 5/25, Wing "Ruin"

For the centenary of the VKHUTEMAS (Higher Artistic and Technical Workshops), the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture has prepared an exhibition about the life of the Faculty of Architecture and the activities of its famous teachers. The exposition was supposed to open in November 2020 and continue the series of exhibition projects dedicated to the history of VKHUTEMAS, however, due to the pandemic and new restrictions, the exhibition was postponed to 2021.

VKHUTEMAS is a multidisciplinary higher educational institution that appeared in 1920 on the wave of reforming art education in the country. The teaching system created here was fundamentally different from the previously existing one and conveyed the idea of the universality of artistic laws. Creativity was not conceived in isolation from practice and was intended to solve pressing utilitarian issues. In the structure of VKHUTEMAS, a special place was occupied by the Faculty of Architecture, all of whose teachers were practicing architects. “In VKHUTEMAS, as in the German Bauhas, an innovative system of teaching art disciplines was developed,” emphasizes the curator of the exhibition, Polina Streltsova. - Two schools arose at the same time and gained worldwide fame and recognition. But unlike Bauhas,where the emphasis was placed on the training of universal specialists in working with the environment - artists-designers, at VKHUTEMAS the Faculty of Architecture occupied a leading position from the moment the school was founded ”.

The main idea of the exhibition of the Museum of Architecture is to tell about the creative methods of teaching architects through their own projects of various structures created during the 10-year existence of VKHUTEMAS (since 1927 - VKHUTEIN). The canvas of the exhibition’s narrative is based on a chronograph, which contains important milestones in the rich life of the faculty, which was in the process of constantly searching for new algorithms for work and developing architectural propaedeutics that was relevant for the era. The visual materials are divided into several sections, each of which reveals the activities of a particular workshop. Changes took place within the faculty, so the division is conditional, but the curators identify the main workshops and directions of the faculty: 1) the workshop of Alexei Shchusev; 2) constructivists (Leonid and Alexander Vesnin, Ivan Leonidov);3) rationalists (Nikolai Ladovsky, Vladimir Krinsky); 4) the workshop of Ivan Zholtovsky (Moisey Ginzburg, Sergei Chernyshev); 5) workshop of the New Academy (Ilya Golosov and Konstantin Melnikov); 6) the founders of domestic urban planning (Vladimir Semenov, Boris Korshunov); 7) restoration schools (Ivan Rylsky, Sergey Toropov).

The exhibition features over 200 items, including architectural graphics and paintings, models, photographs and other genuine materials from the funds of the State Museum of Architecture named after A.V.Shchusev, the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art (RGALI), the Museum of Architecture and Design of the UrSAHU, the A.V.Shchusev family archive, the F.O.Shekhtel family archive, the S.E. Chernyshev family archive, the Canadian Center for Architecture )CAA). Many exhibits will be shown to the general public for the first time.

Exhibition curators: Polina Streltsova, Irina Chepkunova.