Keller Easterling

Easterling on The Laura Flanders Show in 2015

Keller Easterling is an American architect, urbanist, writer, and professor. She is Enid Dwyer Professor and Director of the MED Program at Yale University.

Biography

She earned both her B.A. and M.Arch from Princeton University School of Architecture and has taught architectural design and history at Parsons The New School for Design, Pratt Institute, and Columbia University. She is Enid Dwyer Professor of Architecture and director of the MED program at Yale University. Easterling is a contemporary writer working on the issues of urbanism, architecture, and organization in relation to the phenomena commonly defined as globalization.

Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist in Architecture and Design.

Easterling’s latest book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014) analyzes infrastructure as the determinant of a set of hidden rules that "structure the spaces all around us." Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), researches familiar spatial products that have landed in precarious political situations around the world. A previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. Easterling is also the author (with archivist, writer, and filmmaker Rick Prelinger) of Call It Home: The House That Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc on the history of suburbia and suburban planning. She has completed two research installations on the Web that explore alternative methods and documents for adjusting urban space: “Wildcards: A Game of Orgman” and “Highline: Plotting NYC.” Her work has been published in journals such as Grey Room, Volume, Cabinet, Assemblage, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, Metalocus, and ANY. She has lectured in the United States as well as internationally and her work has been exhibited at venues such as the Queens Museum of Art, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennales.

In spring 2008 she was one of 100 designers chosen by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron to receive a commission for a villa project organized by the Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, as part of cultural district being built by local tycoon Cai Jiang.

She presented the academic paper “Subtraction” in the workshop Mine the city - With logistics to circular metabolisms at the 3rd International Holcim Forum 2010 in Mexico City.

Selected publications

• American Town Plans: A Comparative Time Line. New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.
• Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999.
• Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005. ISBN 0-262-55065-2'
• The Action Is The Form. Victor Hugo's TED Talk. London: Strelka Press, 2012. ASIN B0085JSC44
• Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso, 2014. ISBN 978-1-78168-587-7
• Subtraction. Sternberg Press / Critical Spatial Practice, 2014 ISBN 9783956790461

External links

• Yale University School of Architecture Faculty Page
• Archinect Interview with Keller Easterling
• Easterling's personal site
• Wildcards: A Game of Orgman
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