CCA Events
Keller Easterling: Enduring Innocence
Architecture Lecture Series
Monday, February 26, 2007, 7 pm
Timken Lecture Hall, San Francisco campus
Info: 415.703.9562
Keller Easterling travels around the world to explore both familiar and unfamiliar sites of architectural production that are embroiled in the politics of global trade, labor, tourism, and security.
She bypasses the high-profile international architecture of museums and galleries to visit what she calls "spatial products" (resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, ports, and other forms of enclave). While these products are generally considered to be banal---Teflon formats of neo-liberal enterprises---when adopted by rogue nations, cults, diplomats, and other impresarios, they can become political pawns, no less important than the familiar weapons of war and peace. Acquiring myths, desires, and symbolic capital, they may be objects of desire and contention in negotiations between warring countries, messy democracies, and violent distended conflict. The hilarious and dangerous masquerades of retail, business, or trade often mix quite easily with the cunning of political platforms.
Easterling is an architect, urbanist, and writer. She is the author of Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, and Call It Home, a laser disc history of suburbia. She has lectured widely 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 the Gustav Ranis Prize, 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.
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