Tchoban Foundation — Museum for Architectural Drawing

About this place

The Museum for Architectural Drawing, opened in 2013, is the home of the Tchoban Foundation’s collection of historical and contemporary architectural drawings — a rare institution dedicated entirely to the drawn line. Designed by Sergei Tchoban with his practice nps tchoban voss and Sergey Kuznetsov, the building is itself an argument for drawing. Five storeys of cantilevered, slightly rotated concrete volumes are stacked above a Prenzlauer Berg side street, their surfaces cast with enlarged reliefs of a baroque architectural drawing, so the façade reads as a giant sculpted sheet of paper. The windowless lower floors protect the light-sensitive works in compact, climate-controlled galleries; at the top the solid mass gives way abruptly to a transparent, off-kilter glass box holding offices and an event space with views over the rooftops. The contrast — heavy, ornamented concrete below, weightless glass above — compresses the museum’s whole theme into a single small object. At barely 500 square metres it is one of Berlin’s most concentrated buildings: a piece of architecture about architecture that rewards a close, deliberate look.