Vkhutemas is the acronym for Высшие художественно-технические мастерские Vysshiye Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskiye Masterskiye, the Higher State Artistic Technical Studios, and was the Russian state art and technical school founded in 1920 in Moscow, Russia. Vkhutemas is often called the ‘Soviet Bauhaus’, was an experimental art and architecture school at the forefront of the Avant Garde movement in early modernism. Created in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 that heralded a decade of radical experimentation, Vkhutemas taught the fusion of the arts – sculpture, architecture, painting, graphics, etc. – to create new forms to shape collective values. Vkhutemas closed in 1930 due to political pressures as Stalin’s reactionary neo-realism began to become the state style.

All students were required to take the preliminary course which was based on form, and more specifically spatial composition. Students made particularly accomplished small abstract sculptures usually about 50cm in height, in mixed media but usually quite solid benefitting from having to be structural. Some of the courses in ‘Space’ were based on architectural themes, like ‘an exhibition pavilion’, sometimes worked up with drawings and subsequently developed in greater detail.

Small photographs of the models were made for record purposes and also perhaps to be distributed among the students. A large collection of these photographs are in the collection of the Canadian Centre of Architecture, Montreal.