The Collection
The Tchoban Foundation was founded at a time when architectural drawing seems to have been supplanted by digital design processes. Its founder, Sergei Tchoban, born in 1962 in Saint Petersburg, developed his passion for architectural drawing during his student years at the Russian Academy of Arts. Here he discovered his love for the old Masters and began himself to draw.
In 2001, the purchase of a drawing by Pietro di Gottardo Gonzaga was the corner stone for his collection. Since then, the collection has grown to include several hundred drawings from different periods: from architects of the 16th century to the present day, from Jacques Andouet du Cerceau, Hubert Robert, John Soane and Karl Friedrich Schinkel to Frank Lloyd Wright and Lebbeus Woods.
The foundation owns drawings and visions from the hand of leading international architects of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Aldo Rossi, Gottfried Böhm, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Alexander Brodsky, Moon Hoon and Steven Holl.
The foundation’s aim is to juxtapose its contemporary architectural drawings with works by great draftsman of past centuries, in keeping the tradition of the hand-drawing alive in our computer-driven present. Both parts of the collection will be shown in temporary exhibitions both at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin as well as at other renowned cultural institutions all over the world. A guided tour of the current exhibition including the museums archives offers an insight into the collection storage of the Tchoban Foundation.
