The Pedagogy of VKhUTEMAS and its implications on today’s architectural education

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact that modernism's design pedagogy had on abstract thinking and producing architectural form in design studio. The research investigates the impact of visual and spatial language generated in VKhUTEMAS and its implications in today’s architectural education. This paper looks in particular at two exercises given by Rodchenko (leader of Graphics module) and Ladovsky (leader of Space module), to students at VKhUTEMAS. These very same exercises will be given to the first-year architecture students at UWE, outside of their normal teaching, followed by a focus group. The purpose of the initiative exercise (Rodchenko’s) was to improve compositional organisation and spatial understanding while the space assignment (Ladovsky’s) provoked new ways to conceive form and 3-dimensionality. The paper here presented a reflection on the implementation of these exercises onto contemporary architectural education.