NOTES chapter 8 note 3 Constructivism was a Russian design movement of the early twentieth-century. The name derived from the construction of abstract sculpture from miscellaneous industrial materials, such as metal, wire, and pieces of plastic. The avant-garde movement, in general, stood for the ideals of abstraction, functionalism, and utilitarianism. The architectural Constructivists advocated that the progressive "social task of architecture" was always paralleled by "the technical task" of building rationally on the basis of the latest achievements of technology.