Anna Bokov in Weston Gallery

Anna Bokov is an architect, urban designer, educator, and historian, and adjunct assistant professor at Cooper Union’s Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in New York. With her groundbreaking book Avant-Garde as Method, architect and historian Anna Bokov offered the first scholarly exploration of art and technology education in the Soviet Union. This new, revised, and expanded edition reflects the latest findings of Bokov’s ongoing research on the Higher Art and Technical Studios in Moscow, commonly known as Vkhutemas, and its pedagogical program. It features rich additional visual material that has been discovered in various archives since the publication of the first edition in 2020.

Vkhutemas was the first school to implement mass art and technology education, which was seen as essential to the Soviet Union’s dominant modernist paradigm. It combined longstanding academic ideas with more nascent industrial-era practices to initiate a new type of pedagogy that took an explorative approach and drew its strength from the continuous feedback and exchange between students and educators. Elaborating on the ways the Vkhutemas curriculum challenged established canons of academic tradition by replacing it with open-ended inquiry, Bokov shows how this pedagogy came to be articulated in architectural and urban projects within the school’s advanced studios.