Sergei Tchoban: Sections of the Mind

Comprising fantastic visions, idea competition submissions, personal manifestos, and depictions of buildings now under construction, all artworks presented in Sergei Tchoban: Sections of the Mind - an assembly of 30 freehand charcoal and ink drawings, watercolors, pastels, and prints - explore effective and imaginary use of the architectural section. Cutting through buildings, colonnades, domes, and whole chunks of cities, the architect not merely exposes his structures spatial and material complexities but reveals hidden histories and meanings. In his drawings, Tchoban addresses clashes of extreme dualities head-on. He looks for the right balance between pragmatic and artistic, ordinary and spectacular, historical and contemporary, and offers his take on how to build more engagingly, responsibly, and ecologically.

Building on the traditions of such masters of sectional perspectives as Leonardo, Palladio, Paul Rudolph, and Lebbeus Woods, Sergei Tchoban's idiosyncratic explorations include an underground single-family villa concealed within a characteristic residential courtyard in the city of his birth, Saint Petersburg; nostalgic ruins overtaken by nature; ghostly church spires rising out of the water over abandoned cities; and, most strikingly, surreal urban scenes where futuristic glass cantilevers of the 21 st century are juxtaposed over Piranesi's representations of ancient and baroque Rome. Sections of the Mind at the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture in Manhattan is Tchoban's inaugural exhibition and his drawings are being shown in New York City for the first time.

Sergei Tchoban (b. 1962, Saint Petersburg, Russia) is a German architect, artist, and collector. He graduated from the Repin Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture at the Russian Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in 1986. Tchoban has lived in Germany since 1991. He runs Tchoban Voss Architekten in Berlin, Dresden, and Hamburg. His built works include the Tcho-ban Foundation's Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin, the Federation Tower complex in Moscow, the Jewish Cultural Center and Synagogue Chabad Lubavitch in Berlin, and Russian Pavilions at the Milan (2015) and Dubai (2020) World Expos.

He served as the Russian Pavilion curator at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010 and 2012. Tchoban is the recipient of the 2018 European Prize for Architecture from the European Centre and The Chicago Athenaeum. His drawings have been exhibited worldwide, and they are in permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Albertina, Vienna; Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM), Frankfurt; and Museo della Grafica, Pisa.