Following the October Revolution of 1917, VKhUTEMAS – the state art and technical school active in Moscow from 1920 to 1927 – implemented a pioneering educational model conceived to serve the needs of Soviet society. From its inception, the school was organised into eight art and production departments: Architecture, Painting, Sculpture, Graphics, Textiles, Ceramics, Wood, and Metalworking. Their collaboration was further strengthened in 1923 with the introduction of a two-year Basic division, which comprised four courses: Graphics, Colour, Volume, and Space – the last being the most experimental. For the past forty years, the Soviet scholar Selim O. Khan-Magomedov has served as the principal source of historical knowledge about VKhUTEMAS. More recently, researchers such as Natalia Adaskina, Anna Bokov, Anatole Senkevitch, Luka Skansi, and Alla Vronskaya have expanded our understanding of the school’s operations. However, the broader implications of the Space course as a whole and its relationship with contemporary pedagogy remain relatively unexplored. Drawing on extensive research in public and private archives worldwide, this paper investigates the methods and sequence of avant-garde teaching employed for the Space course between 1923 and 1927. More than a century after its founding, VKhUTEMAS is exceptionally relevant to contemporary architectural education.

This article explores the colonial history of Hong Kong, also known as the Fragrant Harbour, through an inclusive drawing process that uses urban artefacts, place, and time as subjects for excavation, documentation, and projection. This process draws upon the city’s thick and thin of sensory experiences - a phrase this paper understands to mean the physicality of urban arteries (roads and alleys) as well as sedimented layers of time and memory. This concept frames the drawing process as both an archaeological and speculative act: one that excavates the past while imagining futures yet to come. Shaped by 156 years (1841–1997) of British colonial influence, Fragrant Harbour has become a site of unique hybridity where cultures, identities, and everyday practices converge. In response to these conditions, we ask our students to investigate the city through a drawing process of giving and taking, movement and stillness, presence, and erasure. Co-created through graphite lines, their collective work emerged as they gathered to extract, discover, and redraw the Fragrant Harbour capriccio they inhabited.

While organisations in various domains increasingly seek cognitive talents associated with being autistic, several barriers prevent autistic people from joining the workforce. One such barrier concerns higher education: compared to their peers, autistic students are more likely to encounter difficulties during college years. Besides challenges with concentration, socialising, or independent living, their specific way of interpreting the world can make their environment appear disorientating and frightening. Yet in inclusive education practices, the role of the built environment – the design of the campus, buildings, and spaces – hardly receives attention. Our study therefore aims to understand college life on the autism spectrum, viewed through the built environment lens. We used participatory methods to explore five autistic students’ experiences at our university and how spaces affect these. The goal was to identify where – in which spaces – they feel most (un)comfortable. We invited a student organisation to use the insights gained to make their main event more autism-friendly and asked participants to assess the interventions. Central in participants’ college life are study, sociality, and retreat. While their experiences are diverse, for all five the role of space relates to clarity (e.g. clear circulation), distractions (e.g. background noise), and possibilities to escape in socially acceptable ways. Predictability and having control are crucial to ease stress and increase comfort. Rather than explicitly suggesting improvements for spaces experienced as uncomfortable, participants demonstrate creative use and appropriation of spaces. We conclude that small interventions can already make a difference. For future research, we encourage addressing autistic students’ real-life challenges and putting insights into practice while respecting the diversity on the autism spectrum. Given this diversity, we also propose different ways to involve autistic people in studies about and with them.