Trans Siberia
Greta Hansen and Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong
Studio-X New York, 2010
Greta Hansen and Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong investigated the rise and fall of 20th-Century communism in Russian and Chinese cities while traveling the 8,061 kilometer stretch of the Trans-Siberian Railroad between January 28 and February 19, 2010.
They focused 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. Just as imperial-era buildings were once appropriated by communists, the structures in these cities were repurposed during shifting political tides. In Trans Siberia, overlapping political 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 — to form a continuous analysis along the route.