Archinect - News

Mimi Zeiger combs SCI-Arc media archive to create lecture playlist highlighting feminist thought in design

2020-03-09T18:02:00-04:00

Los Angeles-based critic and curator Mimi Zeiger has developed Feminisms: 1974 to Now, a curated video playlist of lectures that have taken place at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) over the decades highlighting "feminist thought and dialogue" at the institution.

The playlist, dubbed a "Collection," is hosted on the newly-launched SCI-Arc Channel website, a dedicated online space that makes available videos created over the last 30 or so years from the school's lecture series, collected via the SCI-Arc Media Archive. Zeiger's Collection includes contributions from Design, Bitches, Penelope Spheeris, Dolores Hayden, Phyllis Birkby, Beatriz Colomina, Sheila da Brettaville, Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Keller Easterling, Esther Choi, Izasjun Chinchilla, and Cecilia Fajardo-Hill.

The lectures focus on a variety of topics that stake a claim the for "feminist outlooks [that] shape our work and our world," Zeiger writes in an introduction for the collection. Ze...

Keller Easterling discusses her latest book "Medium Design" with Failed Architecture

2018-07-09T23:07:00-04:00

In her latest book Medium Design, Easterling turns this idea of disposition to our ways of thinking, and rehearses a set of tools to address unfolding relations in spatial and non-spatial contexts. She rejects the righteousness of manifestos and certainty of ideologies, urging ways of thinking better attuned to complexity and ambiguity.

Keller Easterling, architect, theorist, writer and Professor at Yale University School of Architecture, discusses her new book, Medium Design, with Hettie O’Brien. In this conversation she expounds on the ideas around no new master plans or right answers, tying together concepts from her previous book Extrastatecraft. Easterling asserts, “Culture is good at pointing to things and calling their name but not so good at describing the relationships between things or the repertoires they enact.”

Let's talk about money in architecture

2015-02-25T13:00:00-05:00

Although money is often seen as a taboo topic in art schools, a group of Yale alumni is urging professional architects to place more value on the relationship between money and architecture. The Yale Architectural Journal’s latest edition, titled “Money,” discusses the controversial role of money in the field of architecture. [...] ranging from Frank Gehry to Yale School of Architecture Professor Keller Easterling, the issue urges architects to reconsider the financial side of their work.

More about Perspecta 47: Money here.

Postpolitical Infrastructures

2014-11-18T10:27:00-05:00

The architect today is no ‘fountainhead.’ It is rather sad to watch today’s ‘starchitects’, designing their weird-looking signature buildings. These seem now always to be either museums or condos for billionaires. The brand-name architect just build useless luxury housing for the 1% and their trinkets. The actual design of the world is now in the hands of other people.

McKenzie Wark pens a rather a wake up call of a book review on Easterling's new book Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space in which Easterling offers a set of subsidiary metaphors for contemporary infrastructure design: multipliers, switches, and topologies.

"The multipliers include: cars, elevators, mobile phones. The first, the car, was the multiplier that made possible one of the precursor forms of the greenfields city, the greenfields suburb. But “Levittown was simple software.” (74) Its repeated unit-forms were few. Sadly, it may be the case that the United States never quite acquired the higher-order practices of building forms at the next scale. Hence the endless attempts to solve spatial problems with yet more versions of the Levittown software.

The switch is something like an interchange highway. The switch is a macro-order feature compared to the multiplier, shaping where the multipliers can circulate. Topology might designate the art of patterning switches and ...

Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft

2012-06-11T14:22:00-04:00

In the future the wisest zone entrepreneurs will question this central feature and ask: Why enclave? What types of incentivized urbanism will actually benefit from physically segregated infrastructure—from being separate and even distant from the dense and dynamic central spaces of existing cities? Given that the zone is now generating its own urban programs — aspiring to be a city—what economic and technical benefits can result from constructing what is in effect a double or shadow of the city?

On Places, Keller Easterling traces the global rise of The Zone -- "a.k.a., the Free Trade Zone, Foreign Trade Zone, Special Economic Zone, Export Processing Zone, or any of the dozens of variants." From pirate enclaves to Puerto Rico, from Shenzhen to Dubai, she interrogates the spatial logic of extrastate zones created to avoid national laws.