Cities must never be confused with the words that describe them and no images can capture their richness and atmospheres. Yet, it is stories and pictures that provoke us to imagine the boldest of our fantasies. Perhaps trying to realize them is our biggest error. It may also be our destiny. The social, geographical, engineering, material, organizational, and experiential potentials of cities have long excited the imagination of philosophers, writers, artists, and architects. Their dreams have become ours as we earnestly attempt to venture into such worlds. Sergei Tchoban’s freehand pencil drawings, watercolors, pastels, and prints invite us to embark on such journeys.
Sergei Tchoban: Toward New City, an exhibition that assembles 70 hand drawings—from a sketchbook page to large poster-size prints—by the German architect, artist, and collector, Sergei Tchoban. They are loosely organized into several groups—nostalgic ruins overtaken by nature and submerged underwater, inverted and half-split domes, utopian structures that serve as stage settings for the most power-hungry tyrants and pharaohs, multi-perspectival and warm eye views of familiar buildings in entirely unexpected contexts, impossibly cantilevered futurist fantasies, surreal urban scenes overlooked through ordinary domestic windows, sky-pocking spires, and grotesque clashes of architectural styles from different historical epochs, all pointing toward the new city, rushed to be completed while decaying along its edges, the place at once feared and desired. Inhabiting this new city is our innermost challenge.
Tchoban’s deeply personal contemplations about the past, present, and future occur in his favorite cities—his native Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Rome, Berlin, Amsterdam, Venice, Mantua, New York, Miami, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Macao, as well as fantastical settings in fictitious metropolises growing out of his rich imagination. Some of the drawings on view depict the creations of the architect’s contemporaries and colleagues who practiced in the 20th century. There are also about a dozen drawings of his own projects. Yet, there is a safe distance between most of the featured drawings and his architecture. The architect’s passion for designing buildings is guided primarily by urban mise-en-scène settings that he enjoys and captures on paper in his frequent travels. Explaining his preferences Tchoban has a straightforward attitude, “I always ask one simple question—would I want to draw one of my own projects or my colleagues’ projects?” He brings many of the experiences from his extensive travels into his work and he voices his concerns to all architects: “It is juxtaposing different layers—historical and contemporary—that is the most urgent theme in architecture today.”