Sergei Tchoban: The Latest Architecture and News

"Steven Holl – Drawing as Thought," an extensive exhibition of the American architect's original watercolors, is now on view at the Tchoban Foundation Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin. It reveals insights behind some of Holl's key projects and design methodology. The selected drawings range from early unbuilt winning competition entries to some of the latest visions now under construction in Europe and the United States. Occupying the museum's two levels, the show opened on February 6 with a conversation between Holl and the museum's founder and architect Sergei Tchoban, as well as addresses by Kristin Feireiss, the exhibition's curator and founding director of the next-door Aedes Architecture Forum, and Diana Carta, an architect and scholar from Rome. The show, which can be visited until May 4th, is accompanied by a catalog that states, "The work of internationally renowned US architect Steven Holl is distinguished not only by his extraordinary buildings, with a focus on cultural and public structures such as museums, art centers, concert halls, libraries and universities worldwide, but also by his artistic oeuvre, which today comprises more than 50,000 sketches, black-and-white drawings, and watercolors. […] While exhibition visitors will only encounter a small portion of his extensive body of work, each drawing should be explored and studied individually, in keeping with Holl's intent."

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Located in the area between Sachsendamm and Berlin Südkreuz S-Bahn train station in Schöneberg, a new mixed-use complex, EDGE Suedkreuz Berlin, was completed last month by Berlin-based architect Sergei Tchoban and his firm Tchoban Voss Architekten with additional offices in Hamburg and Dresden. The complex comprises two freestanding structures—a larger Carré Building and a smaller Solitaire Building. Together they occupy their own block. The pair is now the largest hybrid-timber complex of buildings in Germany and one of the largest in Europe.

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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 started his practicing career in Russia but left for Germany in 1991, becoming a managing partner of nps tchoban voss in Berlin in 1995. Since 2006, he also heads SPEECH, one of the leading architectural offices in Moscow. Apart from building his successful career of a practicing architect, he is a collector of architectural drawings, publisher, and museum owner.

“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

For the past month the Russian-German architect, artist, and collector Sergei Tchoban has 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.)

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Architect Sergei Tchoban has been selected as this year’s Laureate of the European Prize for Architecture. Considered Europe’s Highest Award for Architecture, the prize is presented by the European Centre and The Chicago Athenaeum. Tchoban was chosen for his powerful designs and a unique design vision that celebrates the best of modernist buildings that are internationally iconic, complex, enigmatic, provocative, and profoundly artistic.

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Russian-German architect Sergei Tchoban of Tchoban Voss Architekten has won the Gold Medal in the First Athens Architecture Club Exhibition, organized by the Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design. Participating architects included Steven Holl, Daniel Libeskind, and Santiago Calatrava.

The Athens Architecture Club seeks to resurrect the historical architecture clubs of the 19th century, functioning as an “open forum, an infrastructural framework, and support platform for architects, artists, and writers to discuss, challenge and enrich a dialogue among practitioners and scholars.

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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?“

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.