Lecture and presentation of the book: "Enduring Innocence”, Keller Easterling
Keller Easterling is an architect, urbanist and writer. Her new book Enduring Innocence: global architecture and its political masquerades (MIT, 2005) researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. Her last book “Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America” applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. Easterling is also the author of “Call It Home, a laser disc history of suburbia”; and “American Town Plans”. She has recently completed two research installations on the Web: “Wildcards: a Game of Orgman” and “Highline: Plotting NYC”.
Easterling has been widely published in journals such Grey Room, Volume, Cabinet, Assemblage, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, Metalocus, and ANY. Her work is also included as chapters and anthologies in numerous publications. She has lectured widely in the United States and internationally at such places as Princeton, Columbia, Yale, University of Pennsylvania, SCI ARC, Cornell, Syracuse, RPI, Pratt, Ohio State, UVA, University of Toronto and the Wexner Center. Her work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, the Architectural League, the Municipal Arts Society and the Wexner Center. She has received Graham Foundation Grants, NEA Fellowships, MacDowell Fellowships, Whitney Humanities Center Grants, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Design Trust for Public Space Fellowship.
Enduring Innocence examines outlaw "spatial products" -- resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, ports, and other hybrid spaces that exist outside normal constituencies and jurisdictions -- in difficult political situations around the world. These spaces -- familiar commercial formulas of retail, business, and trade -- aspire to be worlds unto themselves, self-reflexive and innocent of politics. Yet these enclaves can become political pawns and objects of contention. Jurisdictionally ambiguous, they are imbued with myths, desires, and symbolic capital. Their hilarious and dangerous masquerades often mix quite easily with the cunning of political platforms. Easterling argues that the study of such "real estate cocktails" provides vivid evidence of the market's weakness, resilience, or violence.
“Enduring Innocence” collects six stories of spatial products and their political predicaments: cruise ship tourism in North Korea; high-tech agricultural formations in Spain (which have reignited labor wars and piracy in the Mediterranean); hyperbolic forms of sovereignty in commercial and spiritual organizations shared by gurus and golf celebrities; automated global ports; microwave urbanism in South Asian IT enclaves; and a global industry of building demolition that suggests urban warfare.
Lecture and presentation was organized with the support of School of Missing Studies / G.LAAB, Faculty of Architecture Belgrade and New Media Center_kuda.org / kuda.nao, Novi Sad.