William Kinne Travel Fellowship awarded by Columbia University GSAPP
Exhibition series funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation

TRANS SIBERIA explores how politics inform architecture. By traveling the length of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the winter of 2010, we investigated the rise [and fall] of 20th-Century communism in the access-dependent cities that developed in Russian and China, alongside the railroad's 8,061 km stretch.

The focus was on the administrative centers of fourteen cities, from the Kremlin and Red Square in Moscow to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square in Beijing—one-third of the earth's latitude away. The dearth of publicly accessible information about these communist-era built "relics" belies Russian and Chinese closed-door policies. These structures have not been erased, nor discarded, with the fall of communism in Russia or the shift to capitalism in China, much like the way that imperial-era buildings were once appropriated by communists. In TRANS SIBERIA, these overlapping changeovers are explored in diagrammatic drawings that reflect the structure of the journey—exploded architectural axonometric drawings of each city's political seats of power, and their development from the early 20th Century to today, forming a continuous analysis from one city to the next along the route.

Collaboration with Greta Hansen