© Courtesy of Sergei Tchoban
“A drawing should be a key to the understanding of architecture – what is there to like or dislike, where do architects’ ideas come from, how do these ideas make it to paper, and what is important in this process.” – Sergei Tchoban
Russian-German architect, artist, and collector Sergei Tchoban has for the past month been the focus of the exhibition, Sergei Tchoban: Drawing Buildings/Building Drawings, bringing together fifty of the architect’s large-scale urban fantasy drawings. These drawings, while intriguing for their technical and artistic value, also reflect Tchoban’s deeply personal contemplations about the past, present, and future of his favorite cities – Saint Petersburg, Rome, Amsterdam, Venice, Berlin, New York – along with in-depth documentation of five realized projects (two museums, two exhibition pavilions, and a theater stage design.)
”Many of us will name Paris, Venice, Rome, or Saint Petersburg, my hometown, as our favorite cities…” explains Tchoban. “I also like London and Milan where contemporaneity plays an important and contrasting role in its dialogue with historical fabric. There are numerous theories about Modernist and contemporary architecture, but we rarely reflect on what role this architecture may play in the totality of a historical city.”
The show traces the design process and highlights the architect’s intentions behind his searching architecture. Tchoban is questioning his own impact on some of these cities. His passion for architecture is guided primarily by urban mise-en-scène settings that he enjoys and captures on paper in his frequent travels. “I have a very straightforward attitude toward architecture,” Tchoban explains. “I always ask one simple question – would I want to draw one of my own projects or my colleagues’ projects?”
Sergei Tchoban (b. 1962, Saint Petersburg, Russia) graduated from the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture at the Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1986. He is managing partner of the Berlin office of TCHOBAN VOSS Architekten and of the architectural office SPEECH in Moscow. In 2008, together with Sergey Kuznetsov, Tchoban started the namesake architectural magazine. The Tchoban Foundation was initiated in 2009 to celebrate the art of drawing through exhibitions and publications. The Foundation’s Museum for Architectural Drawings was built in Berlin in 2013. Among the architect’s other built works are: Federation Tower in Moscow, DomAquarée in Berlin, and Russia’s Milan Expo 2015 Pavilion. Tchoban served as curator of the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennales in 2010 and 2012 (Special Mention), and was named Russia’s Architect of the Year in 2012. He won the 2018 European Prize for Architecture by the European Centre and The Chicago Athenaeum.
”For me a city is like a play in a theater and my buildings perform different roles. There are ordinary buildings and extraordinary ones that perform leading roles. Architects should also know well how to design ordinary buildings. There must be a hierarchy of roles. Not all roles should be leading.”
Museum for Rural Labor, Zvizzhi village, Kaluga region, Russia, 2015
© Dmitry Chebanenko
© Dmitry Chebanenko
Architect/Designer: Sergei Tchoban, Agniya Sterligova
Museum for Architectural Drawing, Berlin, Germany, 2013
Architect: Sergei Tchoban, Sergey Kuznetsov, SPEECH
© Roland Halbe
“We are free not to look at paintings, but we cannot avoid looking at architecture; architecture should be beautiful. I associate beauty with such notions as tension, complexity, and contradiction. Moreover, it is the harmony of contrasts and contradictions, and not only similarities that could be considered as beauty.”
Russia Pavilion, EXPO 2015, Milan, Italy, 2015
Architect: Sergei Tchoban, Alexei Ilyin, Marina Kuznetskaya, SPEECH
Russian Pavilion, 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy, 2012
© Roland Halbe
Theme: i-city / i-land, Special Mention
Curator: Sergei Tchoban
Co-curators: Sergey Kuznetsov, Valeria Kashirina
Stage design for “The Bright Way. 1917” play, Moscow Art Theater, 2017
© Vasily Bulanov
Director: Alexander Molochnikov
Stage and set design: Sergei Tchoban, Agniya Sterligova
”A drawing should be a key to the understanding of architecture – what is there to like or dislike, where do architects’ ideas come from, how do these ideas make it to paper, and what is important in this process.”
Vladimir Belogolovsky, is the curator of the exhibition.
Sergei Tchoban: “We Cannot Avoid Looking At Architecture; Architecture Should Be Beautiful”
After receiving his education at the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in St. Petersburg, Sergei Tchoban moved to Germany at the age of 30. He now runs parallel practices in both Berlin and Moscow, after becoming managing partner of nps tchoban voss in 2003 and co-founding SPEECH with Sergey Kuznetsov in 2006.