Keller Easterling is a thinker intent on peering behind the veil to inquire into the forces and conditions that give rise to forms and spatial formations: the infrastructural, political, and financial milieux that softly but surely govern the production of architectural objects.
Medium Design: Knowing how to work on the world is concerned with a central preoccupation: how can designers and design thinkers operate with agency in the face of “intractable dilemmas” arising from entrenched power and its fixations on convenient solutions? In the words of the late Mark Fisher, how can we “conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we live?”
For Easterling, power lies in “the said as much as the unsaid” — the latent dispositions of organizations, standards, and practices that add up to narrow the window of the possible. If headlong critique only serves to harden these barriers and entrench division, Medium Design seeks out oblique strategies to infiltrate and reprogram. Power, it turns out, “can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable,” requiring shifted perspectives and the “design of cultural narratives” that can propel change.
The explicitly-declared non-manifesto unfolds as a series of situations and thought experiments that invite us to consider design objects in an expanded field: not as autonomous and static things, but as actors and actants engaged in a complex interplay of undeclared dispositions, violence, and polity. This shift “from nomitive to active register” involves a gestalt reversal of figure and ground, painting the spaces between as an active matrix brimming with potentials for intervention that sidestep the pitfalls of habitual solutionism.
An expanded update to an essay of the same title out on Strelka Press, Medium Design serves in many ways as an expanded successor to 2014’s Subtraction (Sternberg Presse, 2014), offering projective, design-oriented strategies for rewiring problems into advantages. Avoiding monolithic solutions, Easterling instead opts for koans that hone and sharpen instincts to sniff out and tune interplays. These interplays involve the tuning of cultural and financial, as much as spatial, variables: land readjustment strategies, community trusts, and limited-dividend corporations that can short-circuit financial speculation, and “switches” that act as “checks and counterbalances to concentrations of power.”
In lieu of the in-depth case studies that characterize Easterling’s previous Extrastatecraft (Verso, 2016), Medium Design favors a staccato approach of scenarios and perspectives, recruiting a broad cast of thinkers to overlay multiple readings and delve into productive contradiction. An exploration of the active form design touched upon in her 2016 work, Medium Design embraces the indeterminacies of dissensus as a venue to rewrite accepted narratives and stubborn habits.
Confronted with runaway political polarization and crises that serve to deepen inequality, Easterling implores operating on the deeper substrata in order to undermine default cultural scripts. “Harvesting failures” to “identify productive ecologies” that arise from intertwined crises of climate and capitalism, Medium Design offers an array of alchemical techniques and acupunctural protocols to disrupt the immunological workings of business-as-usual urbanism. Far from ignoring the role of power in design, Medium Design does as its subtitle suggests: developing methods, parries, and feints for countering the many valences of entrenched capital.
Kearon Roy Taylor is a designer at Lateral Office and lecturer at the John H. Daniels School of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in Toronto, Ontario.
5 Comments
“Harvesting failures” to “identify productive ecologies” that arise from intertwined crises of climate and capitalism, Medium Design offers an array of alchemical techniques and acupunctural protocols to
disrupt the immunological workings of business-as-usual urbanism.
maybe we could simply hear what these "alchemical techniques" are instead of qualifying the possibility of them ad nauseum? this is far too obtuse for my liking; there are very few architects published through verso, and unfortunately this piece, at least from the excerpts pulled in this article, fits too closely to establishment, overly intellectual-jargon that is associated with architectural academia.
i guess at the end of the day i'm still waiting for this questions to be answered: "how can we 'conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we live?'" nothing provided here seems to answer the question, only different ways to approach and ask it.
That's architecture academia in a nutshell - they ask questions about the questions but rarely provide answers. That way, there is no means to assess one's work - but provides a lot of material for others to talk even more about the questions being asked.
agreed, it's particularly bad in architecture. i do admire easterling's intellect, but like you said at some point it's important to articulate the answers, especially if you are claiming to provide them.
There's only one reason someone tries so hard to not be understood, and that's because they are not saying anything of substance. This is not a new technique, but ever since modernism downplayed the importance of beauty, architects have learned to decorate their work with concepts the public will never read no less care about. Here's an excellent tool to help one succeed in this rarified market.
http://www.ruderal.com/bullshi...
I saw her speak as an undergraduate (in the late 2000s). She was so vague about everything that she was able to not make any commitments. Who knows what I'd think of her work now...
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.