Urban Slot Machine

Urban Slot Machine : A conversation with Keller Easterling
Aug 02, 2006

You would be hard-pressed to find someone in architecture today with the kind of versatility that Keller Easterling exhibits. Her ability to navigate in waters as diverse as theater, urbanism, technology, theory, comedy, globalization, literature and capitalism have made her an essential figure in decoding the contemporary condition. Additionally Easterling writes (and speaks) with a highly developed customized vocabulary that serves her choreography of such seemingly unrelated topics. From protocol to spatial products to cocktails to errors, she has devised a way to occupy both literary space (theater) and physical space (architecture / city). Language as a fly tower with layers and layers of malleable phyllo-like backdrops.

The scale that she operates at is typically massive. So massive it is sometimes invisible - infrastructurally present yet physically obscured. Her recent book Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades is structured into six stories (and near mythologies in their own right) of infrastructures as "repeatable spatial items" and three contemplations serving as further speculation. The spatial items Easterling alludes to have the kind of tough-nosed capability to succeed or contaminate in difficult terrain. Development operates as a germ, and urbanism as a slot machine.

Keller responded to several questions on theatre, networks, organizations, and profitably durable urban contagions. Game on.
-- Mason White

American Town Plans (1996), Organization Space (1999), Enduring Innocence (2005)

MW: Your previous book, Organization Space, centers on landscapes of physical and direct connectivity. In some ways it seems focused more on the calibrated space of the line in the network – highways, Appalachian Trail, and town subdivisions – over the point, while Enduring Innocence focuses on the encoding of the system of a network and its dispersed points – ports, Wal-Mart, and megachurches. In the interim between the two books, what factors or observations led you from Organization Space (1999) to Enduring Innocence (2005)?

KE: Your question is the very one I am asking myself now, after having finished Enduring Innocence. There is a larger research premise that sanctions both Organization Space and Enduring Innocence. Maybe that question concerns an amplified understanding of what constitutes infrastructure. For some time we have been considering infrastructure to be something beyond transportation, communication and utility networks. Infrastructure may even include collective standards or shared mechanisms of financing. Still some of our spatial skills would find new territories (and seductions) in an understanding of infrastructure as a recipe for political disposition. A recipe for the character of a polity. Organization Space was already looking at landscape networks as a kind of infrastructure. More importantly, it was looking at the spatial product of suburban housing as an infrastructure. The suburban house was not designed with our conventional skills. The depression era FHA home was a protocol for formatting the land in a way that would revive banks and provide employment through in the building trades. The building trades employed the most people in America after agriculture at that time. Beyond an infrastructure of networks or grids, here was an infrastructure as aggregated field of repeatable spatial items tied to distributed services. It is not really a stretch to consider this kind of spatial protocol as an infrastructure. Infrastructure has always been a technique of political organization, often even a tool of military theaters. Using both networks of services as well as explicit repeatable spatial protocols is an ancient practice. One can jump forward through history from Roman military towns to the Laws of Indies, etc.

(read the whole text here)

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Keller Easterling, guest professor in the Metropolis 2006 program, is an architect, urbanist, and writer and is Associate Professor, Yale University School of Architecture.


Keller Easterling (Online) Bibliography:
On Pirates, Statisticians and Cruise Ship Directors
On Walter Pitts
Wildcards
Plotting the Highline