Tchoban Foundation – Museum for Architectural Drawing Berlin

The Tchoban Foundation was founded at a time when the architectural drawing seems to have been supplanted by digital design processes. The founder is a passionate draftsman and a collector of historic architectural drawings. While just a generation ago, the acquisition of skill in drawing was still fundamental to the formation of architects, such skills play no significant role today, whether in architectural instruction or in professional practice. In the 21st century, virtually no architect seeks to persuade clients of his capacities as a designer by means of sketches or perspective views. Today, a handdrawing is never required for the realization of an airport, an item of designer furniture, a football stadium, or a façade. Yet even now, the development and training of the ability to invent forms and proportional schemas flows through ideas that are conveyed via the drawing hand. Talent and training were the pillars upon which the art of drafting rested well into the 20th century. It is at this point that the Tchoban Foundation intervenes with its attempt to reawaken an interest in architectural drawing.

But a second explicit aim of the foundation is to raise public awareness of the imaginative and emotionally-charged world of the architectural drawing through events and exhibitions. Hence the decision to erect a new museum building on the Pfefferberg in Berlin-Mitte devoted exclusively to preserving and displaying hand-drawn representations of architectural ideas.

The foundation owns hundreds of drawings and visions from the hand of Sergei Tchoban himself, as well as works by leading international architects of the 20th and 21st centuries. The foundation will juxtapose contemporary architectural drawings with works by great draftsman of past centuries, at the same time keeping the tradition of the hand drawing alive in our computer-driven present. Both areas of the collection will be presented in the museum, and exhibitions and publications planned for the new building will include both works from the foundation's permanent collection as well as loans from international collections.