TCHOBAN VOSS Architekten, together with thomas betonbauteile and GROHE, are partners of the exhibition "Plans and Dreams – Drawn in the GDR“, which opens on 23 May 2025 at the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin.
Drawing as a leisure pursuit is a passion of architects worldwide. The striking contrast between the routine of everyday construction and the “productions driven by desire” of creative designers captured on paper enriches the view of GDR architectural history with a hitherto neglected facet. Some cities publish books or hold exhibitions about their unrealised building projects. This exhibition reveals the contours of a “dreamed architectural history of the GDR”.
The two exhibition floors of the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin offer the opportunity to get to know the subject from both sides: striking drawings created for specific building projects in different phases of GDR construction history are compellingly contrasted with private drawings that often disclose completely different visions and reflections – on one level commissioned works, on the other images of aspiration and imagination!
The presentation of around 140 drawings draws extensively on the rich holdings of the Scientific Collections of the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner near Berlin, the most important archive for the architectural history of East Germany in the second half of the twentieth century. Drawings from other archives, museums and private collections will also be on display.
Two curators are responsible for the content of the exhibition: the historian Dr Kai Drewes, Head of the Scientific Collections of the IRS, and the well-known Berlin architecture critic and journalist Wolfgang Kil.
A catalogue will be published that documents all the exhibits and provides illuminating insights into the concrete working-world of architects in the GDR.
Institutional lenders:
Scientific Collections, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS), Erkner
Berlinische Galerie – Museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture, Berlin
Leipzig City Archives
Modernist Archive, Bauhaus University (Weimar)
Saxon State Office for the Conservation of Monuments, Dresden
Weimar City Museum
Werkbundarchiv – Museum der Dinge, Berlin
Archive of the Foundation of Architects from Saxony, Dresden
Klassik Stiftung Weimar
Cultural Office of the City of Frankfurt (Oder)
Plans and Dreams – Drawn in the GDR
Tchoban Foundation. Museum for Architectural Drawing
Christinenstrasse 18a, 10119 Berlin, Germany
Exhibition opening: 23 May 2025, 7 pm
Exhibition duration: 24 May – 7 September 2025
Opening hours: Mon–Fri 2 pm – 7 pm, Sat–Sun 1 pm – 5 pm
Admission: 6 €; reduced: 4 €