Experimental educational design workshop (Archklass) was created at the Architectural Institute on the initiative of Professor Valentin Rannev in 1989. Since 2002, it has been led by Professor Evgeny Ass and Associate Professor Nikita Tokarev (a 1992 workshop graduate). The task of the Archclass is best described by the phrase of Academician Alexander Kudryavtsev (in 1987-2007 rector of the Moscow Architectural Institute) in the introductory essay preceding the monograph: “You cannot teach architecture. You can only try to teach to think with architecture … . Evgeny Ass also fully shares this point of view, believing that there is no “universal and flawless method to teach someone architecture”. “The first thing I want as a teacher is to help students understand the world and the time in which they live,” writes the head of the Archclass in his teaching credo “Lessons in Architecture”.
The reform of instructional design, proposed by Professor Rannev in the late 1980s, consisted in the transition from the generally recognized functional principle of architectural thinking to a program based on "spatial archetypes." Its essence is that all the diversity of architectural forms was reduced to a limited set of spatial typologies, and students mastered them according to the principle from simple to complex - "from a doorknob to a city." This concept was successfully mastered by the workshop, but the institute as a whole, as Rannev dreamed of, was not accepted. Evgeny Ass is convinced that if this happened, “today we would have a completely different architectural education, a different mood, the spirit of the architectural school”. However, the workshop at the Moscow Architectural Institute remained marginalized.
In 2009, the Archclass had a website and a transition to the so-called. "Open program" designed, as Nikita Tokarev writes, to overcome the "tightness" of the former, inscribed in the rigid program of the institute. The restructuring consisted, in particular, in changing the orientation of thinking - not to an object, but to a problem. The work on the project began to be viewed as research, including the analysis of the context, etc. To understand the essence of this fascinating and complex process, it is precisely the vocabulary invented by the Archklass that helps to understand the concepts, names, thoughts of architects and philosophers often mentioned in the classroom. “This is the lexicon of the Archclass, a semantic field that more accurately describes our sometimes intuitive activity than articles and manifestos,” explains Yevgeny Ass.
The current monograph is “constructed” with the same degree of wit that distinguishes the presentation of “experimental” projects: for each letter there are concepts and the works of the workshop that illustrate them. For example, on the letter "D" we find: Dal V. I., the author of an explanatory dictionary, which students like to refer to in their research; “Dialogue” (“experience of understanding the Other”), “detail” (“an element of a building that can be grasped and felt by hand”), “drive” (without which neither the design process nor the project itself can take place).
It is curious that only two architects were honored to be included in the dictionary: Peter Zumthor - “a teacher of thoughtful attitude to little things and their connection with important issues of human habitation” and Christopher Alexander, author of the 1979 book “The Language of Models”, “returning man and human life in the city . But at the end of the dictionary there is a selection of short biographies and projects of the most successful graduates of the Archclass of different years, including Nikita Tokarev, Kirill Ass, Andrey Koshelev, Daniil Lorenz, Fedor Dubinnikov, Anton Kochurkin and others.
The monograph ends with two essays in memory of Professor Rannev, "a quiet reformer" and "a real, born teacher, whose work is in the future, in tomorrow," as Yevgeny Ass wrote. And at the presentation, first of all, Assa himself was honored. So, the architect Alexander Brodsky, who has repeatedly taken part in the work of the jury of the Archklass, said that he considers Evgeny Viktorovich his teacher, although formally he was never his student. Brodsky was joined by real students, or rather students, who prepared a surprise animated film for Yevgeny Ass and Nikita Tokarev.
