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Cycle "Thing" / Lecture 1 / 14.08.2013 Lecturer: Artem Dezhurko In the first years of Soviet power, a department of wood and metal processing (colloquially known as the dermatology department) was created at the Moscow art school VKHUTEMAS. The department was headed by Alexander Rodchenko, who gathered many avant-garde artists under his wing: Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky and artists from the "constructivist" group taught at the dermatology department at different times. Constructivism in art is not the same as architectural constructivism. It is an artistic movement, one of many "-isms" of the early 20th century, invented by Alexander Rodchenko, the Stenberg brothers and their associates. The main idea of the constructivists was to create not images, but real structures. Following this principle, the constructivists designed mass-produced functional things - furniture, posters; and they also began to teach this to their students at VKHUTEMAS. It was an artistic and industrial production, rethought and based on new, avant-garde principles. The Dermatological Department of VKHUTEMAS became one of the first industrial design schools in the world.