activating aesthetics  architectural pedagogy and the function of formalism  

   

The ultimate aim of all visual arts is the complete building!  Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto and Program, 1919  1

  

Architecture is the art of proletarian dictatorship. All other visual arts should serve it or die.    Pavel Novitsky, Arkhitektura Vkhutemas, 1927  2

   

The world sits slack-jawed at the products of the transcendent Bauhaus,  

celebrated as history’s most influential design school. The schools’ products are  

celebrated as brilliant aesthetic distillations of the scientific innovations that thrilled the  

early 20 th century public, and are cherished as the spiritual forebears of the sleekly  

minimalist, technological designs consumers treasure today. More obscured from the  3

public eye is the VKhUTEMAS, the seminal early 20 th century Soviet design school that  

in many ways did for the Soviet world what the Bauhaus did for the West.   

The Bauhaus (and VKhUTEMAS, if people knew about it) is remembered so  

fondly because it carries a sense of early Modernism’s breathless sense of utopian  

wonder, while being curiously unburdened by direct architectural lineage to the  

monolithic concrete Brutalism that the public soured on. Rarely in our collective  

1 Walter Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program” (The Administration of the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar, April 1919), 1, http://mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/ConstrBau/Readings/GropBau19.pdf. 2 Anna Bokov, “Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus: On Common Origins and ‘Creation with Fire,’” Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus Across 100 Years , n.d., 263, accessed November 7, 2019. 3 Nicholas Fox Weber, “The Bauhaus at 100: Science by Design,” Nature 572 (August 6, 2019): 174–75, https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02355-4.

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memory of the Bauhaus do we stop to ponder the exact relationship of the school with  

architecture, and indeed, the common notion that it was a school of architecture is  

rather misguided. Journalists rave of the school’s novel application of “mathematical  4

principles and engineering rigor” to architecture, but other than its famous Dessau  

campus, what buildings can truly claim a direct linkage to the Bauhaus, and not just its  

luminaries? The school did not, in fact, teach architecture for most of its history, and  5 6

certainly not during its most illustrious years, with Walter Gropius as its director. When  

architectural pedagogy did arrive, it was traditional, with studies of the statics and  

tensions of designed space being supplanted by analytic study of the statics and  

tensions of engineered concrete. I posit that perhaps the greatest innovation of the  7

Bauhaus was that it was essentially non-architectural. It provided a liberal arts training  

for the visual craftsperson, and forwarded the notion that the lessons learned would  

elevate the eventual work to create all parts of a building. Rather than directly engage  

the building, the luminaries of the Bauhaus argued that architecture was a discipline  

that emerged from the committed study and execution of craft. While the charge at the  

VKhUTEMAS was more explicitly architectural, and architecture was considered to be a  

core academic program, the curriculum was similarly unconventional (and perhaps  8

4 “How Bauhaus Redefined What Design Could Do for Society - The New York Times,” accessed November 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/t-magazine/bauhaus-school-architecture-history.html. 5 Weber, “The Bauhaus at 100.” 6 The Bauhaus began formal Architectural instruction under the directorship of Hannes Meyer in 1927, more than halfway through its existence. 7 Marty Bax and Jan J. van der Linden, Bauhaus Lecture Notes, 1930-1933: Ideal and Practice of Architectural Training at the Bauhaus, Based on the Lecture Notes Made by the Dutch Ex-Bauhaus Student and Architect J.J. van Der Linden of the Mies van Der Rohe Curriculum (Architectura & Natura Press, 1991), 49. 8 Bokov, “Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus: On Common Origins and ‘Creation with Fire,’” 260.

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even more dogmatic) in its insistence that art and craft were to be teleologically valued  

for their extrinsic value to architecture.  

Though the Bauhaus was substantively non-architectural, it was, of course,  

visual. Though it may seem that Wassily Kandinsky’s purely theoretical approach to  

practice would be excluded from Gropius’s stated disdain for “studio art” without  

“architectonic spirit”, his venerative attitude towards abstraction directly informed the  9

pedagogical strategy of Gropius’s Bauhaus. The Russian expressionist was a leading  

figure in the instruction and formation of the Bauhaus and the VKhUTEMAS,  

respectively . The academies were both centers for radical visual experimentation, and  10

were unique in their institutionalization of avant-garde artistic practice. Since their time,  

however, avant-garde architectural pedagogy has transitioned from radical experiments  

in visual formalism to a nearly-exclusive focus on social structuralism. The formalist  

spirit that permeated the canonical avant-garde design schools of the early twentieth  

century survives in mainstream architectural education, whereas the contemporary  

avant-garde has shifted to the primarily structural realm of the sociopolitical.  

I interrogate the pedagogical approaches of the two early avant-garde schools,  

looking closely at the structural contexts and historical links that shaped their striking  

similarities in synthetic approach and divergent links to architectural practice. I then  

confront the specific visual and spatial theories of the academies, gauging the  

magnitude of differences between their essential reductive logics and using this gap as  

a barometer for their success in rationalizing art and craft. I synchronously analyse the  

9 Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program,” 1. 10 Clark V. Poling, Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus: Color Theory and Analytical Drawing (Random House Incorporated, 1986), 12.

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links of the two schools with the avant-garde artistic philosophies of the time, with a  

particular eye towards the interface of their pedagogy with Constructivism and  

Rationalism. I briefly discuss the political incompatibilities that led to the dissolution of  

both schools, and gauge the pedagogical legacy of the Bauhaus as its luminaries were  

dispersed throughout the world (and especially the United States during and after  

World War II). I ultimately argue that the transformation of avant-garde architectural  

pedagogy from aesthetic formalism to an exclusive focus on social, structural  

approaches has hampered the ambition of the field and its ultimate ability to affect the  

world. Because architecture has reduced itself to affecting the trajectory of existing  

space instead of transforming social conditions through reinvention, architecture does  

not consider itself to be a capable originator for radical social reorientation.  

Structuralist approaches to architectural thought have hampered the executive ability of  

the architect to create. In short, today’s structuralists are failing to produce structures. I  

urge a reconvention of artists, technologists, environmentalists, and designers to create  

a new synthesis of design in service of the complete city. This cooperative endeavor,  

modeled as a more thoroughly comprehensive Bauhaus-style integration of the  

concerns that inform today’s spatial situations, would be robust in its theory and  

incising in its polemical slant. Education in this model would product artist-engineers  

fully equipped to design a future that both spiritually speaks to the humans and  

responsibly manages our relationships to the natural and human environments.   

 

 

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PEDAGOGICAL CONCEPTIONS  

 

The Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS were both characterized at their inception by a  

common desire to dissolve the boundary between artistic education and production.  

The schools sought to elevate the cause of art in the industrial world, if not the profile  

of the individual artist. From their shared mission to institutionalize the avant-garde  

emerged an essentially parallel pedagogical structure, one that remained remarkably  

stable throughout the schools’ lifetimes. Despite the striking similarities between the  

fundamental organization of both educational programs, the Bauhaus and  

VKhUTEMAS existed in disjunct political contexts-- a distinction that manifested itself  

in both subtly significant differences in their executions and their having markedly  

different presences in their nations.   

The schools’ common goal to holistically integrate distinct artistic practices is  

perhaps most immediately apparent in their implementation of a robust and  

broadly-focused sequence of preliminary courses. The VKhUTEMAS program was  

formally established as the Core Division in 1923, several years after the school itself,  11

and proved to be instructive in cleanly defining the school’s architectural vector (that is,  

the institutionalization of the avant-garde). The program, designed to last an entire two  

years, elevated into curriculum the concerns of the four principal components of  

Wassily Kandinsky’s Institute of Artistic Cultural (INKhUK), an intellectually diverse  

organization founded in tandem with VKhUTEMAS with the intention of developing the  

11 The VKhUTEMAS was founded in Moscow in 1920, replacing the previous Svomas.

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“scientific basis for visual, spatial, and temporal arts”. Courses in space, volume,  12

graphics, and color provided fundamental training in the subjects of architects,  

sculptors, Constructivists, and Objectivists, respectively. Though the Core Division  13

underwent several mutations, including the splitting of the Color course for two  

separate considerations of oil painting and color studies, and the truncation of the  

program to a year’s duration, it provided an essential logic for the multidisciplinary  

training of applied artists and was ultimately a “unifying structure” for a novel model of  

artistic institution .   14

In pursuit of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, Walter Gropius conceived  

training at the Bauhaus as being necessarily divided into three courses, for  

“apprentices, craftsmen, and young masters”. Central to the training of the apprentice  15

was the Vorkurs , the mandatory introductory sequence featuring a trio of courses  

regarding theories of form, composition, and material. Unlike the VKhUTEMAS Core  

Division, the Bauhaus Vorkurs lasted only half a year. In this time, students found  

themselves intensely working with pen, canvas, and physical material in preparation for  

hands-on activity in the workshops. The ultimate goal of this form of education, as  

recalled by Gropius upon his 1937 instatement as a professor at Harvard's Graduate  

School of Design, was to “produce this type of men… who are able to visualize an  

entity… rather than get absorbed too early into narrow channels of specialization”.  16

12 Bokov, “Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus: On Common Origins and ‘Creation with Fire,’” 255. 13 Bokov, 257. 14 Bokov, 258. 15 Bax and Linden, Bauhaus Lecture Notes, 1930-1933 , 30. 16 Walter Gropius, “Tecture at Harvard University,” Architectural Record , May 1937, 12.

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Gropius found this holistic cross-disciplinary training essential for the eradication of the  

“arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist”.   17

The unique character of the preliminary course in artistic education is duly  

ascribed to the Bauhaus and VKhUTEMAS. This curiosity is not anomalous, and can be  

explained by the dual affiliations of Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky was seemingly  

aware of the Bauhaus’s integrative approach to education from its earliest incarnation  

in Weimar, with writings of Gropius and his techniques hailing from as early as 1919  

being thought to carry Kandinsky’s signature. Though the linkage has not been  

definitively proven, it seems as though Kandinsky’s 1920 program for the founding of  

INKhUK drew heavily from his knowledge of the Bauhaus and its concern with “the  

unification of the arts” (see figure 1 for a comparison of the uncanny similarities in  18

17 Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program,” 1. 18 Poling, Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus , 16.

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their structure). Kandinsky envisioned INKhUK as fostering a “Monumental Art  19

Program” that combined artistic fields as diverse as “music, painting, dance, and  

sculpture” into a “synthetic whole”, and he even penned an article regarding  

“architecture as synthetic art” in 1920. The recommendations of the INKhUK group  

eventually formed the basis for VKhUTEMAS’s Core Division, and Kandinsky accepted  

an instructorship at the Bauhaus in December 1921, eventually becoming the  

longest-tenured teacher in the school’s history. It is clear that Kandinsky’s hand  20

featured heavily in the legacies and development of both schools, and can likely  

explain the unusual similarities in pedagogical structure in the geographically disjunct  

schools.   

The political structures within which the two schools existed are almost  

incomparable in their differences. The Moscow Higher State Artistic and Technical  

Studios (VKhUTEMAS) was formally established by Lenin’s decree on December 18,  

1920, bringing into reality a novel model in artistic training with the full privileges and  21

conditions inherent with being an appendage of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist  

Republic. Intake was democratic,targeted to include “as far as possible workers”, and  

there were no tuition or student expenses to speak of. No previous educational  

background or artistic talent needed to be demonstrated to secure admission. In line  

with the most recent socialist directives, the academy enrolled a healthy proportion of  

19 Image from Bokov, “Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus: On Common Origins and ‘Creation with Fire,’” 257. 20 Bokov, 261. 21 “Dekret Soveta narodnykh komissarov o Vysshikh gosudarstvennykh khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskikh masterskikh” [Decree of the Soviet of People’s Commissars concerning the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops].

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female students. The hallmarks of a socialist government are conveyed in the  22 23

conditions of enrollment: students were conscripted into the military. Full penalties of  

desertion were in place, though so was the privilege of a “firmer-than-otherwise”  

supply of rations. Lenin’s founding degree made provisions for the “obligatory  

education in political literacy and the fundamentals of the commmunist world view on  

all courses,” and he visited the academy within a year of its founding . The school  24

quickly became quite massive, enrolling more than two-thousand students. As surely  

emerged both from the prodigious scale of the academy and practical tenor of its  

mission, students and instructors were unconcerned with the exploration or expression  

of their own artistic compulsions, and were rather tasked with the refinement of their  

craft for the “mandate of implementing a new state doctrine” aimed at cultivating a new  

“artistic culture” and setting the foundation for a “communist future”. The diffusion of  25

radical expressions in art across an institutionalized educational system proved to be  

appealing for progressive cultural notables, with multitudinous educators competitively  

seeking a formal position with the school. Many practitioners saw the school’s ethos as  

a unique opportunity to “disseminate their design philosophy on a large scale” .   26

The Leninist leanings of the school’s stated mission are evident in the explicitly  

architectural elements of its education. Lenin’s decree promoted an institution for  

22 Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde Theories of Art, Architecture and the City (Academy Editions, 1995), 162. 23 Anna Bokov, “Rationalizing Intuition Vkutemas and the Pedagogy of Space,” DEFINING THE ARCHITECTURAL SPACE | RATIONALISTIC OR INTUITIVE WAY TO ARCHITECTURE , n.d., 242, accessed November 7, 2019. 24 Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde Theories of Art, Architecture and the City , 161. 25 Bokov, “Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus: On Common Origins and ‘Creation with Fire,’” 244. 26 Bokov, 245.

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“artistic and higher technical training” that aimed to “produce master-artists of high  

qualification to work in industry” . Graduates earned titles such as “engineer-artist”  27

and “artist-technologist”, roles with obvious value in a 1920 Russian SFSR in the  

opening stages of industrialization. Architecture has an irresistible appeal as a physical  

marker of radically ambitious social change. The upheaval of the built environment is a  

visceral symbol of progress. As such, the recasting of design as a scientific discipline,  

replete with objective logics and generalizable theories, situated the school as  

producing professionals in service of the acceleration of statewide industrialization. The  

school’s dean, Pavel Novistky, once wrote that architecture is the chief “art of the  

proletarian dictatorship”, and that “all other visual arts should serve it or die” .   28

In contrast, the Bauhaus has a more obscure origin, born of Gropius’s desire to  

enact the social ideal promoted by the architect Bruno Taut. Gropius’s close  

contemporary, Taut, wrote of the necessity for architects to have “an overview of the  

whole range of art” and to appreciate the “radical efforts of painters and sculptors” so  

that they can “help to bring about the unity of the whole”. To actualize this dream,  

Gropius turned to the medieval model of Bauhütte, an association of stoneworkers  

(who also invited poets, painters, playwrights, and other artists to their ranks) involved  

in the construction of German cathedrals. Those wanting to learn the craft worked in a  

master’s workshop, proceeding through a progression of apprentice to journey-man to  

master craftsman. The spiritual element of the early Bauhaus was strong enough as to  

elicit attention from the public, with one publication openly speculating that the school  

27 Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde Theories of Art, Architecture and the City , 161. 28 Bokov, “Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus: On Common Origins and ‘Creation with Fire,’” 263.

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was associated with stonecraft’s mystical complement, Freemasonry . Gropius’s  29

fondness for the craft guilds of medieval Germany explains his preoccupation with the  

motif of craft throughout his formulation of the Bauhaus, especially such idiosyncrasies  

as his insistence on terming teachers and students master craftsmen and apprentices  30

Gropius clearly did not hope to intervene in the industrial moment with the same  

prodigious magnitude or explicit directness as VKhUTEMAS. He rendered his vision at  

a much humbler scale than his cross-continental contemporaries, opening a  

state-supported (though not state-run) institution with no more than about a hundred  

students at any time. Like the VKhUTEMS, the Bauhaus welcomed women into its  

ranks, though they disproportionately were forced into the weaving workshops . Unlike  31

its peer, the Bauhaus maintained the opportunity for individual expression,  

constructively indulging the independent creative agendas of its students and  

instructors under the condition that they abide by the watchful eye of “strict study  

discipline.” Creative actualization was rather valued in the new unity of “art and  32

technology”, with Gropius emphatically declaring that the common creative source of  

these two ideals “must be explored and rediscovered” to “establish the new ‘idea of  

building” . Perhaps most confounding is the enigmatic relationship of the early  33

Bauhaus with architecture. Though Gropius, himself trained as an architect, makes the  

architectural bent of his school implicit throughout his written work and the structure of  

his workshops, the Bauhaus did not formally begin architectural instruction until the  

29 Bax and Linden, Bauhaus Lecture Notes, 1930-1933 , 27. 30 Bax and Linden, 30. 31 Bax and Linden, 34. 32 Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program,” 2. 33 Bax and Linden, Bauhaus Lecture Notes, 1930-1933 , 39.

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arrival of Gropius’s successor, Hannes Meyer. Gropius famously declared the  34

“ultimate aim of all visual arts” to be the “complete building”, and conceptualized his  

school as a vehicle for the advancement of their sum, with architecture the product  

implied in this operation. His Bauhaus Manifesto and Program clearly states that “the  

Bauhaus wants to educate architects”, but that the “unified work of art-- the great  

structure” is a “distant” aim. Gropius clearly does not see a need for explicit  35

architectural education, nor did he seem to expect that the architect must necessarily  

emerge from this education. He was happy to leave a sizable gap between theory and  

practice. His successor, Meyer, criticized the early Bauhaus as “sectarian and  

aesthetical.” Gropius aspired to objective analysis of previously-subjective design  36

principles, but abstracted the structure of architectural education so deeply as to  

render the once-methodical field nearly spiritual in character. Architecture, once an  

objective practice, was now simply an emergent property of concentrated study in the  

integrative arts and crafts.   

 

VISUAL/FORMAL THEORIES  

Given their disparate pedagogical vectors, it is perhaps unsurprising that the  

specific approaches to visual theory employed in the two design schools are similarly  

divergent. Though the strategies of both institutions were born of Kandinsky’s dualistic  

consideration of color as both an autonomous and applied science, the theoretician’s  

abrupt eviction from the INKhUK in late 1920 led to the industrially-minded  

34 Poling, Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus , 19. 35 Gropius, “Bauhaus Manifesto and Program,” 1. 36 Bax and Linden, Bauhaus Lecture Notes, 1930-1933 , 46.

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VKhUTEMAS largely abandoning the notional approach of “laboratory art”. Indeed,  37

the principal problem driving the institution’s scholarship soon transitioned from one of  

composition to one of construction. Continued conversation within INKhUK would  

drive the blossoming of this word, significantly homophonic in its suggestion of both  

engineering and the process of elemental artistic arrangement, into a formal artistic and  

architectural philosophy centered around the explicit adaptation of art to the principles  

of functional organization. The ideology’s particular mission of applying artistic  38

experimentation to daily life was made explicit in the INKhUK-adjacent thinker Alexei  

Gan’s 1922 Constructivism , a thorough rejection of Suprematism’s anti-utilitarian,  

anti-material thesis. The Constructivist repudiation of El Lissitzky was as political as it  

was artistic -- Gan’s treatise quoted extensively from Karl Marx’s Communist  39

Manifesto , framing himself and his allies as “theoreticians of the proletariat” burdened  

with the “cognitive task” of explaining the essential reality of what “is really going on in  

front of their eyes”. Because the political ambitions of the Constructivist moment  40

placed it in a natural alliance with the transformational infrastructural idealism of the  

young Soviet Union, it would not suffice for the energies of the VKhUTEMAS to be  

contained within an autonomous artistic body. The visual theories that emerged from  

Constructivism were necessarily directed towards architecture and the complete urban  

environment.   

37 Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism , 2005, 7. 38 Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde Theories of Art, Architecture and the City , 101. 39 Though he is popularly remembered as a central luminary of VKhUTEMAS, El Lissitzky did not join the school’s teaching staff until halfway through its existence, in 1925. Though he’d displayed at VKhUTEMAS as early as 1921, his Suprematist thought did not burden the overarching Constructivist slant of the school, even upon his formal integration into faculty. 40 Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde Theories of Art, Architecture and the City , 118.

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Constructivism's essential desire for application led to the practical development  

of color theory as an interrogation between hue and form. The preliminary course  

“Color”, led by Constructivist luminary Gustav Klutsis, explored over four units the  

distinct situations of “1) color volume on a plane, 2) color space on a plane, 3)  

comparison of colored materials on a plain, and 4) comparison of colored materials in  

space.” The sequence promoted the extraction of chromatic essentials and spurred  41

pupils to consider the ways in which these elements constructed the complete art  

object. Although the curriculum of the VKhUTEMAS was distinct in its emphasis on the  

symbiotic reliance between hue and shape, the courses’ most specific color theories  

were essentially adaptations of earlier ideas (especially those of Kandinsky). Although  42

English-language scholarship is limited, the Constructivist tutelage of the foundational  

color courses emphasized the non-objectivity and absolute relativism of the  

relationships between colors (concepts that figure quite heavily in Kandinsky’s  43

preceding scholarship). While the exact extent to which Klutsis deviated from  

Kandinsky’s original outline for a course in color theoretics is unclear, it is evident that  

his instruction drew heavily from Kandinky’s dual emphasis on scientific process and  

artistic experiment; he contented himself extending these practices towards  44

architecture.   

Though they commonly prioritized chromatic experimentation as a central  

component of the preliminary course, the Bauhaus differed in its explicit treatment of  

41 Anna Bokov, “VKhUTEMAS Training,” in Pavilion of the Russian Federation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition — La Biennale Di Venezia (Venice, 2014), 108. 42 Evgueny Kovtun, Russian Avant-Garde. (Parkstone International, 2014), 47. 43 Kovtun, 44. 44 Poling, Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus , 46.

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with physical form or built space. The school’s open endorsement (even celebration of)  

the purely conceptual enabled celebrated expressionist Johannes Itten to actualize his  

vision of bringing into “objective principle” the previously subjective attitude of the  

“harmonious concord of colors”. Itten’s conceptualization of chromatic consanguinity  45

must be understood in the context of his intellectual forebears, especially the  

Neo-Impressionist idea that atoms of pure hue should be “mingled only in the eye of  

the viewer”. His quasi-elementarist prioritization of tonal separation drove his  46 47

decision to propound the extensive legacy of Delacroix’s color circle in his own  

schematic ( figure 2 , previous page). Itten’s own schematic arranged the three  48

primaries, three secondaries, and twelve tertiaries in a radial sequence of a triangle,  

hexagon, and circle in order to elucidate a “heightened degree of order and truth”  

between the elements of the natural spectrum . Missing from Itten’s consideration is  49

any consideration of color as it relates to form. His hues are entirely coplanar, operating  

through the relativism brought about by adjacency, not body.   

The spatial theories of the Bauhaus were equally underdeveloped as the color  

theories of VKhUTEMAS; this phenomenon is perhaps unsurprising given the  

anti-architectural bent of the former and the obsession with application embodied by  

the second. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Gestaltungsstudien (fundamental theory of form)  

45 Johannes Itten, The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973), 21. 46 Itten, 15. 47 This idea could also easily be read in the context of the De Stijl movement’s Theo van Doesburg and his theory of elementarism. The Dutch project was, of course, very closely interfaced with the German school. 48 Itten, 21. 49 Itten, 34.

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was not so much a theory in the traditional sense as it was an attitude towards the  

necessity of exploring the interrelatedness of space and time ( figure 3 ). He borrowed  50

50 Louis Kaplan, László Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 3.

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heavily from the relativity theory of Physics (then still quite contemporary), writing in the  

introduction to his Vision in Motion that his work was a “synonym for simultaneity and  

space-time: a means to comprehend the new dimension”. Moholy ultimately distills  51

spatial experience as one emerging from human perception of sight, hearing,  

equilibrium, and movement, allowing these ideas to inform (almost completely) his  

architectural theory ( Bauhlehre ) and its prioritization of the total experience of  

articulated space. Moholy’s architectural theory (the only architectural theory of the  

Bauhaus until 1927) was quite mystical, vaguely arguing for the holistic consideration  

of the “hollow bodies” of a building so that it “transcends into a spatial experience”.  52

Moholy further draws upon the synthetic character of the Bauhausian ethos by  

declaring the “fullest realization” of architecture to exist only in the wake of a through  

consideration of “the deepest knowledge of human life as a total event in the biological  

whole”.   53

In contrast, the VKhUTEMAS’s Nikolay Ladovsky explicitly linked his  

interrogation in spatial manipulation to a new specification of architectural order  

centered around “architectural rationality”. His treatment of space was quite ambitious,  

as he and his students together sought to distill their “esoteric ideas of form and  

space” into a larger theoretical framework containing a “universal system of laws  

governing architecture”. In his initial course, students grappled with space by  54

operating exclusively with models. Designing in clay allowed students to tap into their  

51 László Moholy-Nagy and László Moholy-Nagy, The new vision ; and, Abstract of an artist (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1947), 13. 52 Moholy-Nagy and Moholy-Nagy, 59. 53 Moholy-Nagy and Moholy-Nagy, 60. 54 Bokov, “Rationalizing Intuition Vkutemas and the Pedagogy of Space,” 21.

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“embodied cognition”, arriving at novel forms by utilizing the conceptual distance  

afforded by abstraction. Through such experimentation, Ladovsky hoped to express  55

the seven specific considerations that followed from his concept of architectural  

rationality. Of spatial perception and manipulation, Ladovsky writes:  

In the perception of the material form as such, we can recognize the expression of its  qualities:  1) geometric – relationship of surfaces, corners, etc.;   2) physical – weight, mass, etc.;   3) mechanical – stability, mobility;   4) logical – articulation of surface as such and of surface bounding volume.  Depending on the articulation of size and quantity we can talk about:   a) strength and weakness;   b) growth and invariability;   c) finiteness and infinity.  Nikolay Ladovsky, 1926.  

Although the forms produced from this spatial ethic were fundamentally abstract, they  

were also legibly architectural. The conceptual linkage between Ladovsky’s approach  

to spatial composition and the practical vector of Constructivism was made explicit in  

his desire to facilitate the “utmost human need” of “orientation in space”. A priori  56

abstraction never lost sight of Constructivism’s ultimate pragmatism. Ladovsky’s  

unique spatial intuition rendered his application-heavy pedagogy in clear and  

inextricable alliance with both the intellectual and political moments of the Russian  

experiment.   

The essential similarities between the most specific visual-spatial theories  

promoted by the Bauhaus and the VKhUTEMAS implies that they were largely  

successful in developing generalizable reductive theories of visual formalism. The  

55 Anna Bokov, “VKhUTEMAS Training Pavilion of the Russian Federation at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale Di Venezia,” n.d., 28. 56 Bokov, “Rationalizing Intuition Vkutemas and the Pedagogy of Space,” 21.

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differences in their curricular implementations were a result of divergent pedagogical  

vectors and do not indict the feasibility of rationalizing formal abstraction. Indeed, this  

common prioritization of visual abstraction ultimately drove both schools to be  

fundamentally incompatible with the political moments of their respective nations.  

Although Lenin was never overly enthused by the avant-garde’s infatuation with the  

connection between a student’s art and their individual politics, he eventually arrived at  

a tepid acceptance with the school’s abstract bent (remarking after a 1921 visit “Well,  

tastes differ… I am an old man”). The school made many concessions to justify itself  57

as an essential ally of Lenin’s political mandate, going as far as to design a Lenin  

Institute of Librarianship and Lenin’s Mausoleum to provide personal appeasement in  

addition to the theoretical linkage of Gan’s 1922 Constructivism. Nonetheless, the  

political conjecture of Constructivism’s “new scheme” of education became  

increasingly difficult to square with the political situation of the young Soviet Union.  

Russian media coined the term Leonidovshchina (in particular reference to another  

prominent figure of the VKhUTEMAS) to describe the institution as a “technically  

infeasible fantasy” indicted in “wasting collective time, insulting the proletariat” and  

nefariously “sabotaging the national economic and ideological effort.” The school  58

dispersed by 1930, a decade after its founding.   59

57 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 47, http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db=nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=50381. 58 Catherine Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde Theories of Art, Architecture and the City (Academy Editions, 1995), 174. 59 Cooke, Russian Avant-Garde Theories of Art, Architecture and the City , 175.

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The later Bauhaus engaged in extensive concessions towards the rising National  

Socialists, diluting their anti-architectural conception by introducing formal (and rather  

traditional) engineering-minded architectural education and appointing the  

politically-apathetic Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a sort of “ideological bloodletting” in  

the wake of the socially-engaged (ostensibly ‘leftist’ and ‘communist’) Meyer. Like the  60

fate that befell the VKhUTEMAS, the compromised Bauhaus that emerged from  

repeated instances of conceptual dilution fell victim to accusations of “ideological  

vagueness”. Nazis shut down the Bauhaus by September 1932, and many of the  61

school’s foremost thinkers emigrated to an America eager to absorb Germany’s exiled  

intellectual capital. Although the visual legacies of the canonical early 20th century  

design schools survive in the urban landscapes of global cities, architectural pedagogy  

whose central component is the maverick spirit of radical abstraction has not. Visual  

formalism has moved to the mainstream of architectural education, existing primarily as  

a compromised prerequisite in the first and second year curriculums of most  

architecture schools. Or consider, for instance, the curriculum of the Yale School of  

Architecture’s MArch I and II programs, which require no courses that engage with  

purely abstract visual deconstruction and experimentation. The impulse within modern  

architectural pedagogy is to push completely beyond the ‘laboratory art’ that  62

Kandinsky championed as being so essential to the eventual elevation of architecture.  

But could the anti-architectural vector of the Bauhaus-- a distinction unique within the  

domain of architectural education-- be what ultimately enabled its 100-person  

60 Bax and Linden, Bauhaus Lecture Notes, 1930-1933 , 76. 61 Bax and Linden, 77. 62 Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions , 7.

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graduating classes to have an impact on the history of design unlike that of any other  

institution? The obsession of modern architectural education with ejecting radical  

formalist experimentation in favor of hyperactive dialogues with structuralist social  

issues has hollowed the innovative core of its pedagogy.   

The most interesting contemporary architectural work is unbuilt, perhaps even  

undesigned. It is typically theoretical, as imagined products that lean too heavily on  

visual wonderment are typically relegated to publically interfaced Instagram accounts  

dedicated to cultivating spectacle and inciting likes. Architecture, once panned for  

self-indulgently turning inwards, has responded in equally dramatic fashion by gutting  63

its own aesthetic ambitions in favor of a complete fixation on its capacity to right social  

wrongs. Though this mission is righteous, structuralist approaches to architectural  

thought have hampered the executive ability of the architect to create. The problem is  

simple-- today’s structuralists are failing to produce structures.  

Architecture is a capable originator for radical social reorientation and cannot  

reduce itself to merely affecting the trajectory of existing space. Rather, architecture  64

must transform social conditions through reinvention. I urge a reconvention of artists,  

technologists, environmentalists, and designers to create a new synthesis of design in  

service of the complete city. This cooperative endeavor, modeled as a more thoroughly  

comprehensive Bauhaus-style integration of the concerns that inform today’s spatial  

situations, would be robust in its theory and incising in its polemical slant. Education in  

63 This introversion followed the failure of utopian Modernism, a cautionary tale in the overambition of architecture as a vector for social intervention. 64 Andres Jaque, “Rearticulating the Social - e-Flux Architecture - e-Flux,” accessed December 4, 2019, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/positions/280206/rearticulating-the-social/.

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this model would product artist-engineers fully equipped to design a future that both  

spiritually speaks to the humans and responsibly manages our relationships to natural  

and artificial environments. The transformation of avant-garde architectural pedagogy  

from aesthetic formalism to an exclusive focus on social, structural approaches has  

hampered the ambition of the field and its ultimate ability to affect the world. A  

contemporary synthesis of maverick visual and contextual experimentation will marry  

the integrative anti-architecturalism of the Bauhaus with the pragmatic social  

preoccupation of the VKhUTEMAS to clarify architecture’s vector for a generation that,  

like its forebears, a century earlier, yearns to elevate all of society through built space.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

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