ArchiVision
The Museum of Architectural Drawing opened its doors in June 2013 on the Pfefferberg in Berlin-Mitte. To mark its 10th anniversary, the museum now presents an exhibition focussing on its collecting activities and showing architectural drawings from its own holdings under the title ArchiVision. Works from the collections of the Tchoban Foundation and its founder Sergei Tchoban survey the seemingly unlimited artistic possibilities of architectural representation.
Architecture on paper holds an independent position within the graphic arts, regardless whether it is in the service of realised or unrealised buildings. The show arranges architectural drawings created over four centuries into five cross-period thematic areas, each of which is assigned a specific question.
The first part of the exhibition looks at sketches, the form that architects use to record their first thoughts on paper in their personal "handwriting". Displayed are sketches by Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank O. Gehry and Álvaro Siza. The second section, including works by Herman Saftleven, Antonio Sant'Elia, Hugh Ferriss, Ivan Leonidov and Peter Wilson, focuses on towers and skyscrapers as significant expressions of visionary architectural design. Since a special feature of architectural drawing is that it can simulate reality, the third part of the exhibition presents representations of urban and living environments in works by Hubert Robert, Otto Wagner, Peter Cook, Zaha Hadid and Steven Holl. The fourth group is dedicated to architectural utopias on paper. Here works by Ennemond Alexandre Petitot, Yakov Chernikhov, Lebbeus Woods, Daniel Libeskind and Alexander Brodsky treat highly imaginative forms of construction. The last section highlights large-scale ideas in architectural drawings that might be summed up with the term "world theatre". The drawings show designs, stage sets and fantasias intended for realisation, including works by Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Leo von Klenze, Alexander Rodchenko, Haus-Rucker-Co and Aldo Rossi.
Curated by Eva-Maria Barkhofen, the exhibition offers the visitor an overview of everything that architectural drawing can be, ranging from sketches, construction and presentation drawings to pure fantasy, and finds its finale in the intangibility of abstract form. On 1 June 2023, a colloquium on the subject of architectural drawing will be held at the neighbouring Architecture Forum Aedes. The participants are Sir Peter Cook, Mikkel Frost, Jean-Louis Cohen and Eva-Maria Barkhofen; the moderator is Natascha Meuser. The discussion starts at 4 pm; registration required.