VNIITE: Discovering Utopia: Lost Archives of Soviet Design

Written by the Moscow Design Museum’s Alexandra Sankova and Olga Druzhinina, this book tells the previously untold story of the VNIITE— the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics. Formed in Soviet Russia in 1962, by the design visionary Yuri Soloviev, this vast network contained Moscow’s most progressive designers. The ‘Vniitians’, as they were called, designed for the future and developed new theories and approaches to design in the USSR.

Alongside images of sketches, models and prototypes, the book also includes a selection of covers of one of the USSR’s hidden gems of graphic design — the VNIITE’s monthly journal, Technical Aesthetics. Showcased together for the first time, these covers chart Soviet graphic trends from the 1960s to the early 1990s.