Your Email Address Stay architecturally enlightened! Like Archinect on Facebook. Sign up to our mailing list. Fol low Mason White Aug 2 '06 1 0 Urban Slot Machine: A conversation with Keller Easterling You would be hard-p ressed to find someone in architecture today with the kind of versatility that Keller Easterlingexhibits. 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 protocolto spatial productsto cocktailsto 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 bookEnduring Innocence: GlobalArchitecture and its Political Masqueradesis 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 WhiteTrevor Weltzer~ Passed my LEED Green Associate exam! Editorial & News Features News Events Competitions Employment Community Academia About Login / Join Search Features Filter by Category: » Buildings » Architectural Issues » Employment » Academia » Architects !More Lik e 243 k Send Tweet 0 Share Share Like 8 Send Urban Slot Machine: A conversation with Keller Easterling | ... http://archinect.com/features/article/41816 1 of 10 04/11/2013 20:01
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8/14/2019 Urban Slot Machine: A conversation with Keller Easterling | Features | Archinect.pdf
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 alreadylooking 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.
Using both networks of services as well as explicit repeatable spatial protocols is an ancient
practice.
It is also not much of a stretch to see the similarity of spatial products like suburban houses and
spatial products like cruise ship tours, distribution "parks," malls, golf courses, retail formats or IT
campuses. In the interim between the two books I worked on a project called Wild Cards: A
game of Orgman that tracked a suite of companies that exported spatial products. It was a
moment when there remained in the globalism discourse some remnants of globalization as
"Americanization." This study was a web installation that appeared to be a slot machine in the
global gambles over space-making, a game where everyone was both importing and exporting.
That it was called "a game of orgman" relates to your question. Orgman was Harold Rosenberg's
nickname for William Whyte's "organization man." My contention was that there was a new
orgman who was heir to late twentieth century logistical spaces that are related to US suburbia.
There is a Perspecta article [I wrote] titled "The New Orgman" that makes this point. I suppose
that article and the Wildcards project are the clearest links between the two books.
One always knew that suburbia was a logistical apparatus which was also host to psychic
content and emotional cultural stories about home ownership and patriotism. But was that
phenomenon just related to a spatial product like housing, known to pull at the heart strings? TheWildcards study gradually revealed an entire pantheon of characters, myths, costumes, rituals
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Maquiladora factories, an inland form of offshoring, of Mexico.
MW: You have often employed the idea of “the sea” to il lustrate the contemporary global
condition, whether it is the “place of pirates and the cauldron of democracy,” offshore
trade zones, capital “as a colloidal liquid,” or a critique of Deleuze and Guattari's “smooth
space par excellence” as also capable of confounding and deterritorializing. In addition
you are quick to point out the distinction between landskip and landschaft as they relate
to the productiveness and temporal qualities of territory. How important are these
discussions of landscape and terrain - smooth, hard, liquid, or solid - to architects today?
And how are they manifest?
KE: Someone reading the contemplation about seas in Enduring Innocence might find it to be
theoretical reverie that has little to do with their position as an architect in the world. Some may
wish that critical/theoretical writings were not entirely necessary because they are hard, and
because they open up a black hole of branching reference and philosophical reconciliation.
Annoying too are the ways in which some critics seem to long for an exalted, immortal position
relative to the magnificence of their sophistry. (Yesterday's favorite: Paul Virilio's "I am read
seriously by the French military." A zero-hour claim cum Gilbert and Sullivan lyric.). Yet I can't
somehow find the limits between constructive speculation and applicability. I called some
sections of the text "contemplations" because I wanted them to be more amuse bouche than a
litigious proof or academic ventriloquy. Also since crucial to anything we make is the way it is
positioned and aimed, the contemplations are in some sense practical offerings to use in
sharpening that aim. One wants to contribute some work that will help focus the massive scatter
of efforts that are involved with architecture, urbanism and politics.
But that is not what you were asking. It may only be a very long answer that would address your
question properly and I don't want to rehearse the argument that has already appeared. The sea
seemed to be a very useful index to the works of a number of thinkers on the left and the rightabout what constitutes state, polity, resistance and war. One can also get a sense of a thinker's
particular brand of historiography by their reference to the sea as one of history's main
characters. The sea is also a main character in titantic moral struggles (the Behemoth and the
Leviathan). So reference to the sea was useful for me in reading not only the position but the
disposition of a thinker -- the way in which they made their story epic, righteous or utopian using
the sea as a grand backdrop. The main thing I wanted to do was counter monism, either of the
one-world or Empire variety. We are all nourished by Empire, perhaps even by its description of
a Goliath-Goliath or Leviathan-Leviathan struggle. Yet a righteous symmetrical architecture
embodies the very violence we oppose and may not be effective against more duplicitous
political dispositions. It seems that there are so many other opportunities for tricking and
manipulating the system in ways that are not configured as symmetrical "resistance." I prefer to
imagine myself in impure ethical struggles -- in the logical fallout between multiple worlds. We
are not innocent. We are all, after all, Empire, and we have lots of camouflage and many ways of
ducking for cover in an alternative world. Can we not be ingenious (or sneaky) enough to be
effective against duplicity and evasion. Righteous symmetry is not complex enough. It may even
serve a camouflage for actions we oppose. More than any other profession I can think of, the
work of architecture engages multiple realms from finance to logistics to the heights and depths
of frivolity and fiction that ultimately rule the world. Some think that work in the communication
stratosphere is the truly powerful position. But with architecture one also engages the heavy
material of global economies, moving from communication and branding to shipping to the
physical/financial shape of a golf course to the designing of functional expressions between
layovers and shopping to the indexing of global labor and materials. Would it not make us
powerful political animals to simply be aware of this nexus of movements and begin to index and
make ethical choices within it? We are in a position to help divert some of the world's most
abusive situations.
MW: Absolutely, even if only to participate ourselves in the pirating and trickery ... and
this sits well with the book's "masquerade" subtitling. In coming back to the Wildcards
project, how do you position your work and research alongside the historical trajectory of
game, chance, and play in architecture and urbanism?
KE: Urban design hails the power of the circumstantial, but it seems as if we still have very few
techniques for designing within it. Urban design still often prefers control and even prefers the
specification of building envelope as a means to that end. Game theory and political theory are
not very different. They develop logics that are not designed to deal with deception and folly.
Strange, since urban design and planning as they are accomplished every day, must dig their
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MW: And I'm glad you mentioned Jarry, Huizinga, and Bateson alongside your
background in theatre. Using Bateson's metalogues, Jarry's absurdism, or Huizinga's
conception of play it seems a short distance between your role as a playwright and your
writing on urbanism after globalization. So how do the subjects or methods of your plays
figure in your recent writing? Maybe the slot machine extends to language as well? Come
to think of it, El Ejido or I Love Cruise would make for pretty captivating stage material...
KE: I think, in conversation, I must be allowing it to be more and more apparent that I rely very
heavily on skills learned in a theatrical training, often putting them before those skills acquired in
an architectural training. I didn't learn very much in my architectural training, so I just used other
tools. In theater you had to make everything out of action. Verb rather than noun. We all spoke in
infinitive expressions (very annoying) since what you were doing on stage was all that mattered.
States of mind, mood, and title were only background that you almost forgot so that you could do
something. It is crucial to be able to acquire that skill since what one was saying was not always
what one was doing. "I love you, darling," she said. But what she was doing was murdering him
in her mind. It changes how you are saying it obviously.
So it would have been nice if my teachers had been Cedric Price or someone like him. I would
have been able to understand architecture a little better. As it was transposed, the theatrical
training has made the idea of active organization and the mechanics and character of
organization more clear to me. In a cocktail with theatrical training, Bateson offers insight about
the architecture of active organization.
In Bateson's metalogues one sees that he understood what dialogue is. It is not exposition but
the scraps of sentences and the noises people are making while they are doing something else.
Now, in some new work, I think I am drawing on this theatrical training in understanding the
disposition that organization possesses. Erving Goffman is helpful here, and he too is compatible
with a theatrical habit of mind. I am trying to think about the character of a polity as embedded in
infrastructural organizations. Making a play and making an architectural design have always
seemed like the same things to me, an organizational structure that inflects actions, form, text.
The only thing is that architecture is easier. Within seconds you can hoist up a sketch which is
the general target seen with half-closed eyes. With a play or other kinds of writing (for me)
sometimes I don't know what it is until it is finally done. Much more precarious.
MW: I like that - organizational structure inflecting actions, form, and text. I saw the 2000
documentary No Maps for these Territories on William Gibson recently, and he talks about
his initial frustration with writing fiction in trying to get characters to move. He had such
difficulty introducing action into narrative that he developed a form of imaginary VR
technology that protected him because it allowed characters to change channels. All he
had to do was "switch tapes" and that spared him the embarrassment of not being able to
get characters up and down stairs. However, he expressed total confidence in articulating
finite details of objects within a narrative. In a way, that is where architecture and theatre
part ways. In theatre, content is direct action and reaction as well as form.
We have talked of globalization as it relates to economics and politics mostly, but I know
you have done quite a bit of travel internationally. So, what is your sense on tourism,
leisure, and travel in our current age? And what kind of traveler are you - map-in-hand or
wanderer or idle café observer?
KE: No one would mistake me for an adventurous daredevil or intrepid traveler. I am asnourished by solitude when I travel as I am when I am at home. But I have a canine mind that
learns better when placed in light and air in the actual location under consideration. Some
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