Drawing and Project at the VChUTEMAS. Graphic Interpretations

Abstract

The article deals with the graphic study of the project for the Kominern Palace designed in 1929 by Lidija Komarova, one of the students of the Russian Laboratories known by the acronym VChUTEMAS, founded in 1920 in Moscow. Strongly characterized by the revolutionary atmosphere that was delineating the artistic progress based on the synthesis of all the plastic arts, the Russian Laboratories attributed to the architecture a position of the first order, a perfect association between the scientific possibility and the art technique. The redrawing of this project allows to deepen the compositional principles of the new architectural formation of the Eastern European avant-garde, providing digital images of a graphic heritage, that characterizing the teaching of vChUTEMAS, of which only a few traces are its testimony. Through the graphic reading and redrawing of the project for the Komintern palace, this study sheds light on the facts that characterized the aesthetic culture of the posttsarist revolutionary Russia and of a technical-industrial school a year prior to the foundation of the Bauhaus.