Serguei Oushakine1; 1 Princeton University, United States
Discussion
The paper will look closely at the so called “paper architecture,” which went through an explosive period of development in the last two decades of the Soviet Union. Initially emerged as a string of design projects and models submitted by young architects for various architectural competitions, the paper architecture quickly evolved into an independent genre of architectural fantasies and utopias.
As a cultural phenomenon, paper architecture is mostly associated with a group of Moscow architects. In my presentation, I will focus on a group that has remained overlooked – a small collective of Siberian architects who generated a series of projects in the early 1980s. While utterly phantasmatic and implausible, most of their models and projects were, nonetheless, commissioned (and approved) by local authorities in charge of construction in the region. These utopian building projects, however, never went into production: the collapse of the Soviet Union put an effective end to these architectural paper dreams.
