Review | Sergei Tchoban at the November Talks series 2017 in London
Sergei Tchoban is a Russian and German architect working on many major projects across cities in Europe and Russia. Tchoban was born in St Petersburg and began his career in architecture here, but has lived and worked extensively in Germany, where he now leads a large practice with architect Ekkehard Voss, Tchoban Voss Architekten.
Tchoban has an architectural collaboration in Moscow called Speech, cofounded with architect Sergey Kuznetsov, and also heads up The Tchoban Foundation collection of twentieth and twenty-first century architectural drawings. Amongst other projects, Speech curated the Russian Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, and designed the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin to house The Tchoban Foundation collection.
Tchoban’s lecture, called ‘Architecture as a force of balance’, concentrated on the changing structure of towns. Tchoban argued that a ration should exist within the architecture of towns, whereby 30 percent of the buildings are iconic in nature and 70 percent are more modest in their form and function. He described these background buildings as simple, usual and commercial.
Drawing is an important part of Tchoban’s work and he introduced a series of his black and white drawings to celebrate the richness and detail that background buildings bring to cities.
The first illustration, of a street in Saint Petersburg, showed an iconic tower surrounded by less notable but equally handsome architecture. The next presented a row of background buildings along a canal-front in Venice, each with its own unique architectural features, all driven by function. The next drawing of a square in Brussels, featuring architecture from the 1680s, demonstrated the rich detailing on the handcrafted facades typical of this era. The final drawing, of an area of Gent, illustrated buildings from the 13th, 16th and 20th, carefully layered into a cityscape.
Tchoban came on to talk about the beginning of the twentieth century when contemporary architecture took on a very different form. The next drawing he showed illustrated contemporary buildings in New York sitting in hard contrast to each other. To illustrate the powerful language of contemporary architecture he presented an image of a blue sphere inserted into a classical statue. He followed this with an image of the same sphere inserted into the architecture of an iconic and contemporary gallery, in which you do not notice it, likening this image to a skyscraper on the London skyline. If all buildings are crying out at the same volume, he argued, the contrast is lost.
In the next image Tchoban presented a fictional collage of different iconic contemporary buildings built side-by-side, likening it to an architecture expo, designed to stand for only half a year. Cities, he argued, need modest buildings as their grammar. Like gold around a gemstone, it is surrounding buildings that make the gem valuable. He took Tokyo as an example of a city where every building speaks its own language, yet none are speaking to each other.
As Russia had to rebuild Moscow as the capital of the Soviet Union, he argued it was the first city to use very new and progressive structures against a historic backdrop.
Tchoban went on to show images exhibiting the contrast between old and new architecture and modest and immodest parts, using examples from his own completed projects - including a glass element against a historic and ornamental backdrop, and an outstanding structural facade on an otherwise modest building.
Tchoban voiced his concern on how much emphasis today is placed on creating iconic buildings, despite many commissions being for very simple, very pragmatic, very usual, commercial buildings.
Tchoban closed his lecture by talking about the art of detailing, and the importance of surface and texture in giving buildings a human appeal, using images of Istanbul, San Francisco and Milan to illustrate the richness in texture that buildings can bring to a city. Attention to detail in building elements and surfaces, he argued, is as important in background buildings as iconic ones.
During the question and answer session, he argued that if left to the architect or the client every building would be iconic, and it is the role of planners and master planners to maintain the balance of architecture within cities and towns.
Interview with Sergei Tchoban
The Video can be found on our YouTube-Channel.
November Talks
The successful “November Reihen”, a lecture series on contemporary architecture, has been funded by the non-profit Sto Foundation since its launch in 2006. Stuttgart, Graz, Milan, Paris, Prague and London are the six venues . Exciting work reports by renowned architects can be experienced there.
