The architecture of extraction is often transient and unseen, yet it reshapes entire landscapes and lives. After the “discovery” of vast petroleum and natural gas reserves in Northern Western Siberia, portable buildings were mobilized to house waves of oilmen, surveyors, and construction crews. Block-boxes, barrel-shaped wagons, and prefab barracks arrived by rail, sea, truck, or helicopter, deposited onto lands long used by Khanty and Nenets for herding and hunting. What happens to architecture when settlements rapidly emerge in response to state-driven resource extraction? Through selected objects from the CCA Collection, Ksenia Litvinenko explores how fly-in/fly-out urbanism and portable buildings shaped labour regimes and Indigenous dispossession in the Soviet North, comparing them to parallel developments in the Canadian Arctic during the late Cold War.

This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited, so registration is required. Admission to the museum is included with your registration.

Ksenia Litvinenko is a historian of the built environment specializing in Soviet architecture and urbanism. She received her PhD in Architecture from the University of Manchester in 2023 and is currently a Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellow at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner, Germany.