Keller Easterling Lecture in San Francisco
Keller Easterling, architect, writer and professor is lecturing as part of AIA-SF Architecture and the City Festival at the Academy of Art University School of Architecture / Monday, September 10th 2018, 6pm at 601 Brannan Street, Large Atrium Space, San Francisco, CA 94107 USA the lecture is free and open to the public. Accompanying the lecture is the opening of the exhibition “Examining Future Urban Conditions” showcasing student work examining the political, technological and environmental implications in the urban condition.
Keller Easterling, architect, writer and professor at Yale University will elaborate on her most recent book, Medium Design (Strelka Press, 2018). Privileging declarations, right answers, proofs, and universals, culture is often banging away with the same blunt tools that are completely inadequate to address contemporary chemistries of power. On the flip side of these logics, Medium Design offers no dramatic manifestos where things are new or right. Instead it only rehearses a habit of mind that has been eclipsed. Even at a moment of digital ubiquity, Medium Design treats space as an information system and a broad, inclusive mixing chamber for many social, political, technical networks. And just as it inverts the typical focus on object over field, it may also invert some habitual approaches to problem solving, aesthetics and politics.
Other books include: Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg Press, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. An ebook essay, The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk (Strelka Press, 2012) previews some of the arguments in Extrastatecraft. Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) which researched familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999) which applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure.
Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home: The House that Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934–1960. She has published web installations including: Extrastatecraft, Wildcards: a Game of Orgman and Highline: Plotting NYC. Easterling’s research and writing was included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennale, and she has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Rotterdam Biennale, and the Architectural League in New York. Easterling has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad. The journals to which she has contributed include Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, Cabinet, Volume, Assemblage, e-flux, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, and ANY
Monday, September 10, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Medium Design | lecture by Keller Easterling
Academy of Art University, School of Architecture
601 Brannan St.
Free Admission (registration required)
