Medium Design

Medium Design
Keller Easterling
Introduction by Alexander Wood
Response by Jana Berankova

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity. A recently published e-book essay titled Medium Design (Strelka Press, 2018) previews a forthcoming book of the same title. Medium Design inverts an emphasis on object and figure to prompt innovative thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems.

Other books include Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) which researched familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999) which applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure, and Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), which considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse.

Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Architecture and Design. Her MANY project, an online platform facilitating migration through an exchange of needs, was exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her research and writing on the floor comprised one of the elements in Rem Koolhaas’s Elements exhibition for the 2014 Venice Biennale.

Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home: The House that Private Enterprise Built, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934–1960. She has published web installations including Extrastatecraft, Wildcards: a Game of Orgman and Highline: Plotting NYC. Easterling has exhibited at Henry Art Gallery, the Istanbul Design Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Rotterdam Biennale, the Queens Museum and the Architectural League. Easterling has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad. The journals to which she has contributed include Domus,* Artforum, *Grey Room, Cabinet, Volume, Assemblage, e-flux, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, and ANY.

Organized by the Advanced Architectural Design program.
Free and open to the public.