Keller Easterling ist eine Architektin und Professorin, deren Arbeit die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen Infrastruktur, Politik und Raum untersucht. Sie betrachtet globale Netzwerke als Medium politischer Organisation und überlegt, wie Entwicklungsprozesse umgekehrt werden können. Ihre Analysen konzentrieren sich darauf, wie bekannte räumliche Formen durch herausfordernde politische Situationen weltweit gestaltet und beeinflusst werden. Easterling nähert sich Architektur und Städtebau aus einer unkonventionellen Perspektive und erforscht die verborgenen Kräfte, die unsere Umgebungen prägen.
»Die ungehobenen Möglichkeiten des Mediums und das spektakuläre Versagen der Kultur regen dazu an, eine andere Vorstellung von Design zu entwickeln – die Herstellung von Formen aus einer anderen Tonart und Sprechweise heraus. Indem es die Autorität invertiert, die den Erklärungen, Masterplänen, Standards und Gesetzen innewohnt, gewinnt Mediumdesign zusätzliche politische und ästhetische Potenziale aus der Unbestimmtheit, der Widersprüchlichkeit, dem Temperament und den Latenzen in Organisationen.«
Extrastatecraft is the operating system of the modern world: the skyline of Dubai, the subterranean pipes and cables sustaining urban life, free-trade zones, the standardized dimensions of credit cards, and hyper-consumerist shopping malls. It is all this and more. Infrastructure sets the invisible rules that govern the spaces of our everyday lives, making the city the key site of power and resistance in the twenty-first century. Keller Easterling reveals the nexus of emerging governmental and corporate forces buried within the concrete and fiber-optics of our modern habitat. Extrastatecraft will change how we think about cities—and, perhaps, how we live in them.
Unbuilding is the other half of building. Buildings, treated as currency, rapidly inflate and deflate in volatile financial markets. Cities expand and shrink; whether through the violence of planning utopias or war, they are also targets of urbicide. Repeatable spatial products quickly make new construction obsolete; the powerful bulldoze the disenfranchised; buildings can radiate negative real estate values and cause their surroundings to topple to the ground. Demolition has even become a spectacular entertainment. Keller Easterling's volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth. All over the world, sprawl and overdevelopment have attracted distended or failed markets and exhausted special landscapes. However, in failure, buildings can create their own alternative markets of durable spatial variables that can be managed and traded by citizens and cities rather than the global financial industry. These ebbs and flows—the appearance and disappearance of building—can be designed. Architects—trained to make the building machine lurch forward—may know something about how to put it into reverse.
