Tchoban Museum

The Tchoban Foundation’s Museum for Architectural Drawings opened its doors in June 2013. A high-quality collection of architectural drawings, some of which hail from sealed archives, is now housed here. In future, the museum will show changing exhibitions featuring works from the collections of architect and designer Sergei Tchoban, as well as drawings from international collections, such as the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris. Tchoban himself owns important works from six centuries and donated the majority of them to the foundation. One of Tchoban's particular design pieces is to be found in the bathrooms: the washbasin from the Esplanade series by Duravit defines a new opulence. The initial designs were the work of the architect.

The museum building itself is both striking and entirely appropriate: with its rotated and slightly protruding elements, the building appears to have been constructed from stacks of papers. The proportions are in keeping with the neighbouring buildings, whilst it adopts and reinterprets elements such as the oriel and the loggia. A glass penthouse is positioned on the roof. The colour and appearance of the façade refer subtly to the building’s function: the closed, sandy-yellow-coloured surface is interspersed with enlarged fragments of architectural drawings in relief.