A pristine unopened copy of VNIITE: Discovering Utopia – Lost Archives of Soviet Design, a beautifully produced Unit Editions volume on the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Aesthetics.

VNIITE was an enormous, strange, visionary Soviet design body founded in 1962 and tasked with imagining better futures through objects, interiors, systems, transport, domestic design, technical aesthetics, and everyday material life.

Written by Alexandra Sankova and Olga Druzhinina of the Moscow Design Museum, this book pulls together a largely hidden archive of Soviet design thinking: modular kitchens, experimental furniture, vehicles, industrial forms, domestic technologies, exhibition design, theory, prototypes, and visual systems. It is less glossy design nostalgia than a window into an alternate design logic — one where utopia was bureaucratised, diagrammed, prototyped, photographed, filed, and then partly lost to history. Extremely your-taxpayer-funded-future-kitchen-will-liberate-the-human-spirit, which is to say: incredible.

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. 

Hardcover. Unit Editions. New/unopened. Limited edition of 2000. Published in English. 206 pages. A very handsome object, not merely a book — the kind of thing that makes a coffee table look like it has read theory and owns a drafting lamp.