Russian architect and draughtsman Sergei Tchoban has always striven to understand the laws which govern the development of cities such as his native St Petersburg and the great prototypes in whose image it was created. But is it possible to preserve such cities’ outstanding quality today? Can we pursue this quality now, at the current stage of development of architecture?

This catalogue poses these central questions. It accompanies an exhibition of Tchoban’s work at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, scheduled to take place from October 2020 to January 2021. It also marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Tschoban inserts emphatically futuristic structures into the Italian artist’s eighteenth-century Roman street scenes. Do such works constitute ruined masterpieces or imprints of the future? Is harmony being destroyed or is a fundamentally new type of harmony being created?

Tchoban believes that a similar transformation of the European city has been happening for at least a century and that society must finally work out how to relate to this process. Essentially, Piranesi’s true legacy is a call to an honest conversation regarding the layers and parts that constitute the European city as both a highly important piece of our heritage and a space for future development.