In 2009, the archi­tect Sergei Tchoban, a pas­sion­ate drawer him­self and col­lec­tor of his­tor­i­cal archi­tec­tural draw­ings, founded the Tchoban Foun­da­tion. The foun­da­tion aims to pro­mote train­ing in the clas­si­cal draw­ing for up-and-coming tal­ents and to open the excit­ing world of archi­tec­tural draw­ing up to a wider public. The Museum for Archi­tec­tural Draw­ing, which opened in 2013, con­sti­tutes a unique loca­tion in which the foun­da­tion can real­ize its objec­tives.

The museum is housed in a dis­tinc­tive new build­ing, the four-sto­ries of which are stacked on top of one another like build­ing blocks. The sto­ries are pro­jected and recessed, which makes for an extra­or­di­nary sil­hou­ette and a recessed glass story on top com­pletes the con­struc­tion. The mag­ni­fied frag­ments of archi­tec­tural sketches incor­po­rated into the col­ored con­crete of the façade as a relief are another highly effec­tive detail and, far from being con­fined to the museum exte­rior, the sophis­ti­cated design con­tin­ues on the inside too. An impor­tant aspect of this is the light­ing con­cept, the key ele­ment of which is a light line. Lines of light cover the walls of the stair­well, are incor­po­rated into the ban­is­ters on the land­ings, flank the entrance, and form the sole light source in the exhi­bi­tion areas.

As well making for an impres­sive design, the light strips in the ceil­ing close to the walls in the exhi­bi­tion areas con­sti­tute an excel­lent light engi­neer­ing solu­tion for illu­mi­nat­ing the draw­ings. The LED light sources used are free of UV light and their lumi­nous flux can be adjusted to the require­ments of the chang­ing exhi­bi­tions by means of a light con­trol. This ensures strin­gent con­ser­va­tion require­ments are met reli­ably while cre­at­ing good vis­i­bil­ity con­di­tions for museum vis­i­tors at the same time. The rooms are lent a bright and spa­cious ambi­ence, attained by means of the spe­cial light dis­tri­b­u­tion from LED pro­file lumi­naires. Selux devel­oped a spe­cial solu­tion for this project based on its M family of lumi­naires. Unin­ter­rupted light lines are inte­grated into an 80 mm cross sec­tion pro­file, with pre­cisely cal­cu­lated pris­matic blocks installed in front of these as optics. For the exhi­bi­tion walls, a wall washer optic system gen­er­ates homo­ge­neous light with­out any dis­cernible shad­ing, such as might occur with indi­vid­ual spot­lights, mean­ing the exhibits can be freely sus­pended with­out the light­ing having to be adjusted.

Project-spe­cific LED-pro­file lumi­naires by Selux are also used in the museum’s foyer. These are inte­grated as rec­tan­gu­lar con­tours into the high-gloss ceil­ing and fitted with down­light optics. Since the foyer also func­tions as a library, gen­eral light­ing with suf­fi­ciently high hor­i­zon­tal illu­mi­nance at work­ing plane was also required here.

With the Museum for Archi­tec­tural Draw­ing, a light solu­tion has been real­ized which meets the require­ments of cura­tors, vis­i­tors and museum man­agers. The light­ing concept’s strength of design and very low energy con­sump­tion with min­i­mal heat load is highly impres­sive too. Such qual­i­ties were also appre­ci­ated by a jury of the German Light Design Prize 2015, which awarded the project a prize in the Muse­ums cat­e­gory.