100px|Architecture at Vkhutemas, book cover by El Lissitzky,
1927Vkhutemas was the Russian state art and technical school founded in
1920 in Moscow. The workshops were established by a decree from
Vladimir Lenin with the intentions, in the words of the Soviet
government, “to prepare master artists of the highest qualifications
for industry, and builders and managers for professional-technical
education.” The school had 100 faculty members and an enrollment of
2,500 students. Vkhutemas was formed by a merger of two previous
schools: the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and
the Stroganov School of Applied Arts. The workshops had artistic and
industrial faculties; the art faculty taught courses in graphics,
sculpture and architecture while the industrial faculty taught courses
in printing, textiles, ceramics, woodworking, and metalworking. It was
a center for three major movements in avant garde art and architecture:
constructivism, rationalism, and suprematism. In the workshops, the
faculty and students transformed views of art and reality with the use
of precise geometry with an emphasis on space, in one of the great
revolutions in the history of art. In 1926, the school was reorganised
under a new rector and its name was changed from “Studios” to
“Institute”. It was dissolved in 1930, after political and internal
pressures throughout its ten-year existence. The school's faculty,
students, and legacy were dispersed into as many as six other schools.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vkhutemas>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1846:
Peasants led by Jakub Szela began an uprising against Polish nobles in
Galicia in the Austrian partition, killing about 1,000 people and
destroying about 500 manors.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_slaughter>
1861:
With Italian unification almost complete, Victor Emmanuel II of
Piedmont, Savoy and Sardinia assumed the title King of Italy.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Emmanuel_II_of_Italy>
1908:
The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, Sweden's national stage for
"spoken drama", opened with playwright August Strindberg's play Master
Olof.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Dramatic_Theatre>
1932:
The Empire of Japan established Manchukuo, a puppet state in
northeastern China during the Sino-Japanese War.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchukuo>
1943:
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Propaganda Minister, delivered the
Sportpalast speech to motivate the German people when the tide of World
War II was turning against Germany.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportpalast_speech>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
tetchily (adv):
In an annoyed or irritated manner
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tetchily>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the
arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love.
--Nikos Kazantzakis
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis>