Interview by Rob Wilson
uncube’s indefatigable interviewer Rob Wilson spoke to the Russian-German architect Sergei Tchoban, founder of the Tchoban Foundation and Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, about his passion for the haptic of the hand-drawn.
Where does your fascination with drawing and architecture come from?
I came to architecture through drawing. When I was a child what I always loved drawing spaces and textures – and creating within those drawings new abstract forms. Then when I started studying drawing at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg, I noticed that what I found most enjoyable was drawing my built surroundings. Only later did I come to realise that I was also interested in building.
What do you like about the act of drawing?
For me drawing is like a language through which I try to understand and talk to myself about what I like or where my focus is. It’s a means to finding my own language.
In your own work as an architect how does drawing feed into your built projects?
It is complementary to them: for me drawing and building are two more or less parallel roads. I often draw just in order to create a drawing and often in designing a building I would not necessarily produce a conceptual drawing for it. But with the Tchoban Foundation’s museum building I specifically made drawings to explain the idea. A good building is a good building and a good architectural drawing, a good drawing. They can connect but not necessarily.
When did you start collecting architectural drawing and which was the first one you bought?
It was fifteen or sixteen years ago. There’s an old auction house called Galerie Bassange, in Berlin: a very traditional one for drawings. I opened the catalogue and saw a wonderful drawing by Pietro Gonzaga (1751-1831), a very important stage designer for La Scala in Milan in the second half of the eighteenth century, who later emigrated to Russia. There he designed a lot of important theatre installations and even some architectural projects. I saw the drawing, loved it, and it was the first one I bought.
How large is your collection of drawings now?
Not so large. The Foundation’s collection is maybe 1,000 pieces and my own collection about 200 pieces.
Is there are any type or period that you are most interested in?
In my private collection, the drawings are mostly from the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth century, while those at the Foundation are from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Why did you decide to create your own foundation and museum for architectural drawing?
Well the major step was just thinking: if drawing’s so interesting for me, I’d like to be able to show how interesting it can be to lots of other people too. So I created the Museum as a platform, not only for the Foundation’s drawings, but also for other museums such as the Sir John Soane Museum in London and the Albertina in Vienna to exhibit their drawings too. By providing the perfect conditions for drawings, the building enables exhibitions that many larger institutions often can’t hold, even in their own museums, where drawing shows are often sidelined.
Tell me about the building’s design and its façade with its clear representation of drawing inscribed on the outside.
The concept was to try to explain the function and contents of the building through its skin; and the idea was to reflect the drawings in my collection on the façade, so the marks on it actually come from that first Gonzaga drawing I bought. I like the depth to the skin that it gives, which also comes from my wanting to give the architectural form a type of hapticity that often got lost in the twentieth century; so the building’s detail will get more interesting as it ages.
Is this quality of physicality and texture also what attracts you to hand drawings: the interest in the thing itself, in the actual object?
Yes, I am very interested in the haptic nature of a drawing.
So how do you view digital drawing; are there some digital drawings that you admire?
I don’t collect digital drawings. But of course I think it’s a very important tool and technique, not only as an aid to accuracy in drawing or rendering a building and its surroundings but also of course for free compositions made on the computer – like MVRDV’s Pig City for example – something not designed to be built: a type of computer fantasy which I really like. But that’s not the focus of the Foundation, and for me it’s not real architectural drawing. It’s an architectural fantasy, like in a Jacques Tati film, but not a drawing.
Do you think it’s problematic that architects rarely now hand draw to design? Has this changed the way they design?
No, I don’t think it’s a problem. Everybody has their own way of creating work: just as not every artist paints today. There are still very good artists, as good as in the past, but only some of them are painters.
Sergei Tchoban (*1962) is a Russian/German architect. He studied architecture at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg before moving to Germany in 1991. In 1995 he became managing partner of the nps tchoban voss office in 1995 and headed the Berlin office. Since 2015 he is the leading partner of the office together with Ekkehard Voss. In 2006, he also founded the SPEECH architectural office together with Sergey Kuznetsov. In 2009 he founded the Tchoban Foundation - Museum for Architectural Drawing.
Tchoban’s graphic works have won numerous prizes and have been exhibited in leading galleries and museums throughout Europe, and there are several monographs devoted to his drawings, including one by Image Publishers (2013) and Skira (2015).
He was twice curator of the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture: in 2010 with Russia Factory and in 2012 with i-city/i-land.
tchoban-foundation.de
So the digital just provides further tools for people to use to express themselves?
Yes exactly, to make their own fantasy…
You have your own large architecture practice too. How do you manage to run the Foundation too?
Being the creator of this Foundation is a part of my practice as an architect because for me architecture, architectural drawing and popularising architectural drawing are three parts of the same thing. Of course it takes time but if it is part of your life, of your interest, it also makes for a lot of fun. I
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