A truly rare opportunity to listen to Sergei Tchoban - and his lecture was the first and only this year - attracted a large number of listeners to the Pushkin Museum. The lecturer was very late, and the audience kept coming. Therefore, instead of one announced lecture, I managed to listen to three at once. First, the director of the Pushkin Museum Marina Loshak spoke about the upcoming exhibition program of the museum, then her deputy Anna Trapkova told about the progress and prospects of the reconstruction of the museum town according to the project of Yuri Grigoryan. Finally, Sergei Tchoban appeared, and literally from the first words it became clear that they were not waiting for him in vain. In less than an hour, the architect revealed the chosen theme “Drawing of architecture” vividly and fully, anticipating his speech with an excerpt from a 1979 film directed by Andrei Smirnov, which tells about almost blind idealism, the architect’s childlike conviction that he does good. In fact, this is not always the case. Even professionals with a capital T are often blind. To be not inside the process, but in the place of the viewer, in order to fully understand the world that the architect builds not only within himself, but also for other people, according to Choban, is possible only at the moment of drawing. In essence, this is a moment of introspection, an attempt to understand yourself, a way to understand your personal preferences, which may turn out to be different from what the architect has designed all his life.
The book by Sergei Tchoban - very laconically designed, with large, beautifully and high-quality printed reproductions of the author's drawings - despite the practical absence of verbal text, answers many questions that the architect asks himself today. One of the main ones is the harmonious coexistence of historical and modern architecture. Sergei Tchoban admits that in recent years he and his colleagues too often hear about the absence of the old harmony in architecture. However, one must understand that the concept of harmony has changed a lot over the past hundred years. This evolution of the perception of architecture can be easily traced by turning the pages of a new book. Here is a fragment of a Leningrad street - a school drawing by Sergei Tchoban: buildings of different scale, variable heights, interesting details of the first floors. Here, even terraced buildings have more life than individual modern architecture. We see the same in the graphic works of the architect, bridges and streets of Venice, Brussels, Amsterdam, Nice - a human scale that is directly associated with classical harmony.
These are all historic European cities. If you look at the architecture of the 19th century in Chicago or New York, then the scale, forms, and compositions will be different, sharper. Here a new aesthetics is revealed, which is becoming dominant today. In one of the drawings of New York, numerous layers of buildings from different eras are clearly visible. The contradictory picture, meanwhile, carries in itself beauty and harmony, since both small details and the necessary density of the environment are preserved in it, allowing a person to feel like an integral part of it.
Modern architecture, according to Tchoban, has practically lost the ability to conduct a dialogue with its neighbors. As confirmation of his words, the lecturer showed an artificially created illustration - a street consisting exclusively of famous masterpieces of modern architecture. The resulting bright, screaming collage immediately aroused a lively reaction from the audience: without unnecessary explanations, it became obvious to everyone that no one could live inside such an environment, even if it respects the scale of a historic city, says Sergei Tchoban. Jealous, conflict-minded architecture does not want and cannot fade into the background, it is not able to coexist with its own kind and becomes relevant only as a part of the historical context.
Such a conflict architecture arose in Moscow at the beginning of the 20th century, when the feeling of constancy of space disappeared, says Sergei Tchoban. The architects painted skyscrapers behind the back of the Cathedral of St. Basil the Blessed (see the project of the building of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry of Ivan Leonidov), but such a reality at that time turned out to be impossible. Today, the fantasies of those years were partially realized in the form of the Moscow City complex, which has already become an integral part of the city, or the La Defense district in Paris. Ideas of the beginning of the last century are no longer considered to be something out of the ordinary. Which of today's seemingly unrealizable plans will come true tomorrow, no one knows. In the book of Sergei Tchoban, next to drawings from life, fantasy images-reflections of the author appear on the theme of the city that he himself would like to see. They contain the same neighborhood of existing and new architecture, which is not yet understood by the viewer. While this is a thought about the impossible, a contrasting combination of different layers of the city at different levels of its development. But that's just for now, says Choban.
There are already examples of the acute proximity of history and modernity. The Museum of Architectural Drawing in Berlin, realized by Sergei Tchoban and Sergei Kuznetsov, is an example of conflict architecture with a noticeable silhouette. However, when viewed from a close distance, at the level of human perception, one can see both the density and the richness of details inherent in the historical environment, and the relief, and the tactile surface that you want to touch with your hands. This is the quality without which architecture becomes an "enlarged model".
The formula of the city, in which 70% is neutral environmental buildings, and 30% are accent, memorable buildings, seems to Sergei Tchoban the most correct. Contrasting houses can be just small splashes that enliven the fabric of the city - like the cherry on the cake. In conditions when the historical context is absent, the environment building, which carries the sought-after harmony, must be created with your own hands. The question of how to do this is answered not only by the drawings, but also by the architect's built houses - an office center on Leninsky Prospekt in Moscow or a residential area on Krestovsky Island in St. Petersburg, implemented jointly with the workshop of Evgeny Gerasimov. In them we see the very complexity, the volume of the surface, the buoyancy of the cornices that envelop the building, drawing the entrance zone inside; even the doorknob develops the overall architectural mood. According to Choban, these are the very properties that prevent the building from becoming just a box, endow it with special unique properties. Which explains why an insanely banal historical building wants to be painted ten times more than any masterpiece of modern architecture.
The book by Sergei Tchoban, which includes 150 graphic works made in the period from 1994 to 2014, was published in a limited edition. Recently, Sergei Kuznetsov presented his book of drawings at the Pushkin Museum. The idea to publish books for both architects was suggested by Santiago Calatrava, who visited the exhibition "Only Italy!" at the Tretyakov Gallery.
The proceeds from the sale of Sergei Tchoban's book will go to the development of the Museum of Architectural Drawing in Berlin.
