The "Contrasting Harmony of the City" exhibition offers a selection of drawings, architectural fantasies, ideas for set design and various compositions depicting the contrasting harmony between contemporary and historical, iconic and background-architecture.
"How does a thought evolve into a freehand sketch? What is the importance of the interaction between the mind, eyes and hand?“
The 22nd ARCH Moscow International Exhibition of Architecture and Design was held in Moscow on May 24-28. ArchDaily joined the exhibition’s partners this year for the first time, and together with speech: media-project they presented a special exposition during Arch Moscow.
Featuring the buildings that received the ArchDaily Building of the Year award in 2017. The 16 sites that received the most votes this year from visitors of the ArchDaily website became the focus of this exposition designed by the architect Sergei Tchoban (together with the architect Andrei Perlich, and curator Anna Martovitskaya – chief editor of speech: magazine). In order to best show the sites’ photographs and drawings, the installation was designed in the form of 8 double blocks, whose shape and color reference the ArchDaily logo. Before us are snow-white rectangular blocks with the recognizable blue window-niches, and it is in these niches that the photographs of the best buildings of the year are displayed.
9 years ago today, ArchDaily launched with a challenging mission: to provide inspiration, knowledge and tools to the architects tasked with designing for the 3 billion people that will move into cities in the next 40 years. Over these 9 years, as we have developed innovative approaches to help architects tackle the urban challenges facing our world, our work has brought us into contact with some of the most creative and respected architects in the world. To help us celebrate our 9th birthday, we asked 9 architects who are renowned for their creative and imaginative abilities to create drawings inspired by our logo, to show the world what ArchDaily means to them.
Towering like an infinite mountain of stone, a building devoid of windows and doors is hand-drawn in the tradition of the old masters. Elsewhere, colored strips of tape address the same project, visualized as a sequence of stacked layers. In yet another image, this time presented in a more realistic style, the cityscape is framed by two men gazing out at the viewer with a grin.
It’s a daring experiment that Tchoban Voss Architekten undertake in their exhibition “Images from Berlin.” Instead of presenting their projects with the usual means, they have delegated this task to 11 visual artists. The aforementioned works stem from a confrontation by Gottfried Müller and Valery Koshlyakov with the Museum for Architectural Drawing. Meanwhile, the Living Levels are approached by the duo Vrubel & Timofeeva as an everyday urban environment.
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. In 2009, the Tchoban Foundation was formed in Berlin to celebrate the lost art of drawing through exhibitions and publications. The Foundation’s Museum for Architectural Drawing was built in Berlin in 2013 to Tchoban’s design. In this latest interview for his “City of Ideas” series, Vladimir Belogolovsky spoke to Tchoban during their recent meeting in Paris about architectural identities, inspirations, the architect’s fanatical passion for drawing, and such intangibles as beauty.
German-Russian architect, artist, and collector Sergei Tchoban’s new exhibition Bridges & Spires: Reflections on Past and Future presents over 60 large format drawings and watercolors of existing and imaginary structures and ruins, as well as futuristic fantasies of context and gravity defying urban pasts and futures. The exhibition gathers Tchoban’s diverse oeuvre of drawings – from his travels throughout Europe, America, and Asia to urban fantasies that inhabit imaginary underwater canals in St. Petersburg and Venice, and the skies over Berlin and New York. The drawings on view, which span from 1983 to 2016, many exhibited for the first time, present the artist’s continuous pursuit, which is independent of his professional practice.
Sergei Tchoban, managing partner of the architectural firm nps tchoban voss with offices in Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg, SPEECH in Moscow and founder of the Tchoban Foundation – Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin and Andrew Zago, partner and founder of the firm Zago Architecture in Los Angeles will talk about the architectural hand- and computer generated drawings in architectural practice today. The importance of a drawing as an official language of an architect, as well as collecting and displaying it.
The panel will be moderated by Wim de Wit, Adjunct Curator of Architecture and Design at the Cantor.
The harmonial contrast is the harmony of the 21st century: polyphony is meant to be the new language of the contemporary architecture. For several years now, the architect and artist Sergei Tchoban masters this language at its best by reflecting the multiple layers and ambivalent soul of our cities in his architectural drawings. The historical fabric and the present urge towards a significant object-based architecture are melted in fantasy-like perceptions. His hybrid structures of ancient buildings and modern glass towers may also remind of Bach´s Inventions: in a piece with two, three or more parts each of them unfold equally.
Sergei Tchoban was invited by the Architecture Art Planing at the Cornell University to give a talk about his passion for drawing, what is architectural drawing today and about his beautiful historical drawings that he has collected for his museum in Berlin. He will also discuss the development of the Museum for Architectural Drawing, its realization as a building and his choice in the collection.
Standing tall in the expansive landscape of Western Russia, the monolithic Museum for Rural Labor is an architectural beacon for the Kaluga Oblast region. Built of local straw and clay, the eight meter tower is comprised of one round sunlit room adorned with the instruments of manual labor. Jarring, unexpected and mysterious, the museum was conceived by Russian architects Sergei Tchoban and Agniya Sterligova to pay homage to the region's deep agricultural history. Defined by a stark and unorthodox form, the tower disrupts the Russian landscape while simultaneously serving as a wayfinding device for residents from the nearby village of Zvizzhi.
Enter the rudimentary world of the Museum for Rural Labour after the break.
Realtà e Fantasia. Cartoline dall’Italia exhibition conveys a selection of Sergei Tchoban’s architectural drawings. The walls of of the gallery will be covered with 60 sketches – depicting landscapes and fantasies. As a part of the exhibition installation pictures shot in Tchoban’s Berlin atelier – nps tchoban voss –, document some of his completed architectural projects, will give a good idea about the artists visions not only as an architect, but also as someone whose passion is architectural drawing.
Berlin Art Link recently sat down with Russian-born, German architect Sergei Tchoban. In the interview above, he discusses his career, including working on the design for the Vostok Tower, Europe’s tallest skyscraper, and the recent opening of the Tchoban Foundation Museum for Architectural Drawing. This building houses his extensive personal works, as well as exhibitions by other artists. “What is very important for me is the quality of all details, so you create a building from outline, from the silhouette, to the door lever. This building brings out a lot of our and my personal ideas about architecture and about details in architecture,” Tchoban said regarding his design for the Museum for Architectural Drawing. The exterior of the building expresses Tchoban’s devotion to draftsmanship-- the facade of the building is etched with a graphic pattern based on sketches from artists Angelo Toseli and Pietro di Gottardo Gonzaga. “I’m very active in drawings, as a draftsman myself. Drawing is a result of our thinking process and our thinking process is not only a thinking process with the head, with the mind, but also the process where you think with the whole body.”
