Plans and Dreams – Drawn in the GDR

Exhibition catalogue 'Plans and Dreams – Drawn in the GDR'

by Wolfgang Kil and Kai Drewes

in German and English

196 pages, hardcover, published in 2025

ISBN: 978-3-944899-26-8

Were the drawings of GDR architects marked by distinctive features? In the planning offices, they worked with the standard tools of the trade used all over the world. And, as everywhere else, talents were unevenly distributed; each design collective had its own particularly gifted “drawing ace” who ultimately provided the decisive visualisations of a building idea.

The exhibition Plans and Dreams – Drawn in the GDR is about the makers of architecture, about the motives, visions and disappointments of several generations of architects. Every year, they graduated from the architecture departments in Dresden, Weimar and Berlin and, fired by ambitious goals, entered a professional practice in which creative design had to take a back seat to radically mechanised construction processes and increasingly severe cuts in resources. The desire to create freely developed architectural ideas was lived out in daring competition designs or in independent artistic exercises. This exhibition focuses on that difference: professional drawings for specific building projects are contrasted with private drawings, which often reveal completely different visions and reflections. Commissioned images are juxtaposed with images of aspiration and imagination.

For the presentation of over 140 drawings, extensive use was made of the rich holdings of the Scientific Collections of the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS) in Erkner as well as many museums, public and private archives.