100 years after the foundation of the VKhUTEMAS School in Moscow, its educational and research programme in the design disciplines remains one of the cornerstones of contemporary thought in art, design, architecture, and urban planning.
A seminar called “VKhUTEMAS 100. Space, project, teaching” at the Doctoral School of the IUAV – in collaboration with those institutions in Moscow which inherited the VKhUTEMAS’ intellectual legacy – developed several research lines: a series of lessons on the School’s many disciplinary identities and their intertwining in a common design and training vision; an architectural design seminar seeking the form and type for a specific institution to evidence the presence of the VKhUTEMAS in the city of Moscow, which in its day was a crossroads of ideas of civil, artistic and settlement progress for humanity; a “web building” documenting its production of ideas and projects and its intersections with other traditions of the twentieth-century’s avant-garde schools.
In around two years of meetings between doctoral schools with a grand tradition – those of Venice, Rome, Naples and Bari – there was much debate on suggested designs for the form of what we had decided to call the MIVKh – the Museum of the Idea of VKhUTEMAS – a project for today’s world.