Sergei Tchoban: Sections of the Mind
Comprising fantastic visions, idea competition submissions, personal manifestos, and depictions of buildings now under construction, all artworks presented in Sergei Tchoban: Sections of the Mind—an assembly of 30 freehand charcoal and ink drawings, watercolors, pastels, and prints—explore effective and imaginary use of the architectural section. Cutting through buildings, colonnades, domes, and whole chunks of cities, the architect not merely exposes his structures' spatial and material complexities but reveals hidden histories and meanings. In his drawings, Tchoban addresses clashes of extreme dualities head-on. He looks for the right balance between pragmatic and artistic, ordinary and spectacular, historical and contemporary, and offers his take on how to build more engagingly, responsibly, and ecologically.
Building on the traditions of such masters of sectional perspectives as Leonardo, Palladio, Paul Rudolph, and Lebbeus Woods, Sergei Tchoban's idiosyncratic explorations include an above- and below-ground single-family villa concealed within a characteristic residential courtyard in the city of his birth, Saint Petersburg; nostalgic ruins overtaken by nature; ghostly church spires rising out of the water over abandoned cities in Russia; and, most strikingly, surreal urban scenes where futuristic glass cantilevers of the 21st century are juxtaposed over Piranesi's representations of ancient and baroque Rome. Sections of the Mind at the Paul Rudolph Institute for Modern Architecture in Manhattan is Tchoban's inaugural exhibition. His drawings are being shown in New York City for the first time.
