The new museum is intended to house a unique collection of drawings and watercolors by Western European architects, painters and draftsmen of the 18th - first half of the 19th centuries, which Sergei Tchoban has been collecting for many years. In 2009, he founded a special foundation, whose main task was to popularize this art form and demonstrate its relevance for the development of modern architectural aesthetics. Over the past three years, the Foundation has held several exhibitions in different countries of the world, including Germany and Russia. In order to transfer the exhibition activities of the Foundation on a permanent basis and make the collected collection available to the general public, Sergei Tchoban, together with his partner Sergei Kuznetsov, decided to build the world's only Museum of Architectural Graphics. The situation is all the more unique because the owner of the collection himself designs the complex for exhibiting it - but on the other hand, it seems to be almost the most logical and correct, because who, if not an architect who collects architectural graphics, has the best idea of what the ideal space should be. to show it.
As Nadezhda Bartels, a representative of the Sergei Tchoban Foundation, told us, the site for the construction of a new cultural institution was chosen by the curatorial council of the Foundation, which, in addition to the architect himself, includes Christine Faireis (Aedes architectural gallery) and Eva-Maria Barkhofen (head of the architectural archive of the Academy of Arts in Berlin), and almost the main search criterion was the area with the corresponding "content". Prenzlauer Berg became such an area - this is the very center of East Berlin, you can walk to the museum island and the famous Unter den Linden in 15-20 minutes at a leisurely pace. For a long time, Prenzlauer Berg was predominantly a working-class area, but after Berlin took a course towards sustainable living, numerous factories and factories were moved out of the city, and galleries, music studios, shop artists and fashion designers opened in former industrial quarters. flea markets. In particular, on the territory of the former brewery "Pfefferberg", where the museum of architectural graphics will be built, the gallery "Aedes", the studio of Olafur Eliasson, and the gallery Ikeda are already operating.
The new museum will be built on the site of a one-story factory garage and will join the firewall of a nearby four-story building. In many respects, it was this neighborhood, that is, the location "back to back", as well as the very modest size of the site itself, that dictated the space-planning decision of the future complex. Unable to either step back or actively develop to the sides, the museum complex increases its volume vertically, rising clearly to the level of the ridge of the neighboring roof. And so that the building is not visually perceived as a banal extension to an existing house, the architects compose it from five blocks slightly offset from each other. And these are by no means parallelepipeds - some of them have angles strongly bent to the side, others resemble the letter "G" in plan. Thanks to this variety of shapes, dynamic and dissimilar consoles appear on the facades of the building, and the building itself resembles a stack of boxes.
The architects propose to finish the uppermost block with mirrored glass, which will visually reduce the height of the museum building and deprive it of excessive elongation, and the facades of the four lower blocks will be faced with decoratively treated concrete panels of light sand color. At the molding stage, some of these panels are supposed to be covered with vertical grooves - a kind of flutes that seem to have migrated onto the concrete surface directly from the works of architectural graphics. However, there will be a much more direct indication of its function and content on the facades of the museum - about half of the panels are supposed to embossed imaginary architectural landscapes filled with buildings of different eras. Individual elements of the painted buildings - windows, cornices, pediments - will be glazed and turned into museum windows, so that daylight, penetrating through them, will fall on the inner walls of the entrance hall and exhibition halls in a "thematic" pattern.
From the side of Christinenstrasse, the planes of the massive concrete walls at the ground and third floors are torn apart by two large stained-glass windows that accentuate the main facade and the entrance to the building. On the first floor of the museum, it is planned to place the actual entrance lobby, cash desks and a small bookstore, in the interior design of which stylized architectural landscapes are also used. Four exhibition halls intended for exhibiting Sergei Tchoban's collection and for hosting guest exhibitions are located on the upper floors, one on each. The levels are connected by an elevator and stairs (the communication core is quite predictably located close to the existing building), and on the top floor there is also a small observation deck, allowing you to enjoy the views of modern Berlin.
According to Nadezhda Bartels, the museum will be open by the summer of 2013, and the first exhibition plans are already being actively discussed by the fund's curatorial council. “We are planning not only a permanent exhibition, but also joint actions with other museums, such as with the École nationale supérieur des beaux-arts in Paris, where our exhibition opened last October, and with the Sir John Soane's Museum. in London, where the exhibition is scheduled for 2013”.
