Think you already know everything about architecture in the GDR — prefabricated housing, standard types, functionalism? This exhibition might surprise you. Plans and Dreams – Drawn in the GDR at the Tchoban Foundation doesn’t focus on the finished buildings, but on the process behind them: more design than outcome, more vision than construction. With over 140 sketches, collages, and drawings, the show traces four decades of architectural work, highlighting the people and ideas that shaped it. For anyone interested in architecture, this is a chance to dive into built history and the struggle for creative freedom that often accompanied it. Alongside official project plans, you’ll find private, personal works: visual spaces for hope, reinvention, and occasionally resignation.
Featured are works by students from Dresden, Weimar, and Berlin, who entered the profession full of ambition and had to navigate the realities of a cost-optimized, standardized system. The material is drawn from the collection of the Leibniz Institute for Spatial Social Research (IRS) in Erkner. And enriched by loans from the Berlinische Galerie, the Leipzig City Archive, the Archive of Modernism at Bauhaus University Weimar, and private collections. An exhibition not only for those who think, draw, and build architecture, but for anyone who wants to see the urban fabric of Berlin in a new light.
Text: Milena Kalojanov / Credit: Michael Voll, Wolfgang Wähnelt; Leopold Wiel, Entwurfskollektiv Wiel mit Klaus Wever, Grafik Angela Waltz, Stiftung Sächsischer Architekten, Stadtarchiv Dresden, Nachlass Leopold Wiel
Tchoban Foundation, Christinenstr.18a, 10119 Berlin–Mitte; map
“Plans and Dreams – Drawn in the GDR” until 07.09.2025
@tchoban_foundation
