Architect Sergei Tchoban, a founding partner at Sergei Tchoban Voss Architekten, has been named the 2018 European Prize for Architecture laureate. The prize is Europe’s highest architectural recognition and is jointly presented by The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
Tchoban’s modernist-inspired work has been a mainstay of Berlin for the last 20 years, and spans a variety of forms, colors, and uses, from religious institutions to cultural buildings, to offices and commercial centers.
The president and CEO of The Chicago Athenaeum, Christian Narkiewicz-Laine, said in a statement:
We are delighted to present The European Prize for Architecture to this highly innovative and creative Russian/German architect that has been instrumental in shaping in our time an unprecedented and inspiring discourse between art and architecture with the keen ability to bridge and transform imagination and the creative mind into the actual built works in the environments in which they are placed.
His is a most rare, thought-provoking, and profound approach to architecture, extensions of his life, his philosophy, and his intellect, that fuse the power of imagination into the final end product—the building.
It’s important to note that the European Prize for Architecture isn’t a lifetime achievement award, but rather meant to draw attention to an architect’s work and spark further innovation; some of the past mid-career winners of the prize include Bjarke Ingels, Santiago Calatrava, Graft Architects, TYIN Architects, Marco Casagrande, Alessandro Mendini, LAVA Laboratory for Visionary Architecture, and Manuelle Gautrand.
Tchoban has also been recognized for his drafting and drawing abilities, and he founded the Tchoban Foundation – Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin in 2009 to nurture the hand drafting and drawing talent of young architects. Tchoban has also been designing in Russia since 2003 and helped design Europe’s tallest skyscraper, the 1,226-foot-tall Federation Tower, in Moscow with architect Peter Paul Schweger. Tchoban was also one of the curators of the Russian Pavilion for the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.
“In my projects, I try to go beyond the boundaries of the accustomed Modernist minimalism,” said Tchoban, “which is based on producing a particular perfection of the architectural detail, but does not quite reach that atmospheric environment, which we admire in our favorite cities.”
