REALTA E FANTASIA Cartoline dall’Italia Exhibition | Tchoban Voss Architekten

Architectural drawing has always been one of the most advanced and most powerful ways of giving visible form to the process of intimate study and analysis performed by all architects worthy of the name.

The history of architecture is represented with extraordinary vivacity in the thousands and thousands of pages, albums and notebooks that accompany the studies and free visionary imaginations of the many architects who use the technique. If they were all put together, the result would be a brand new, highly courageous story, product of their most inaccessible and daring thoughts.

Moreover, there are cultural and geographic traditions of using this tool to lay down the foundations of university and sentimental education, generation after generation.

These great focus areas include the Russian-speaking world, where the most significant designers still view design as a vast laboratory in which to lose oneself in search of stimuli for one’s work.

Sergei Tchoban is one of the most convincing and original members of the latest generation of Russian architects, the product of a condition falling somewhere between a critical, disenchanted reinterpretation of modernism, the power of the tradition of past centuries and a highly dynamic relationship with the contemporary world.

Beyond his prominent built projects, primarily in Russia and Germany, what is most striking about this central figure in contemporary Russian culture is an almost religious dedication to the world of drawing in all its possible forms.

A dedicated collector, Tchoban recently set up an independent foundation for the purpose, which supported the design and construction of a museum specifically for drawings in central Berlin.

The building, which completes the corner of an existing industrial complex, has attracted a lot of interest for the importance of its archives and for the many public exhibitions it has hosted.

At the same time, over the years Sergei Tchoban has established his own private, highly passionate relationship with the practice of drawing: when he sits down before a blank page, the designer addresses interpretation of historical and contemporary cities, with a special focus on the relationship between the monument and public space, while at the same time working on production of true graphic follies in which the historic memory of places addresses a number of key themes in his work, such as water and motion.

A small but representative selection of the extraordinary collection of drawings Tchoban has accumulated over the years may be seen at the important exhibition Realtà e Fantasia. Cartoline dall’Italia at SpazioFMG per l’Architettura during the summer of Expo 2015.

Curators:

Luca Molinari

Alessandro Benetti

Valeria Kashirina

Esenija Bannan and Lev Chestakov