BERLIN.- The question whether distinctive features marked the drawings and creative process of architects and planners in the GDR may seem obvious, but looking at individual pictures alone is unlikely to lead to new insights. During the decades of specific GDR architecture, up to the mid-1980s, East German planning offices worked with the standard tools used all over the world. As everywhere, talents were unevenly distributed, each design collective having its own particularly gifted “drawing ace” to provide the decisive visualisations of a building idea for important project presentations or competition submissions. So it would be quite possible to illustrate a stylistic history of four decades of GDR architecture with the help of selected drawings from various years and regions.

A close-up view of the relevant architects, however, reveals another world of images. This one was about dreams, visions, utopian hopes and comforting personal affirmation. Freehand drawing was intensely fostered at the three GDR architecture faculties. More than a few graduates later supplemented, refreshed or counteracted their mandatory professional training with private drawing work. Or simply used chalk, pencil and brush to relax from the stress or all-too-dreary routine of everyday office life. The desire for freely developed creative ideas was lived out in bold competition designs or in drawings, graphics, watercolours, etc. Comparing the drawing activities of GDR architects (which are distinct from the “paper architecture” of the late Soviet Union) with their respective commissioned work should therefore prove particularly interesting.

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.