Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture And Its Political Masquerades

by Keller Easterling

In Enduring Innocence , Keller Easterling tells the stories of outlaw "spatial products"—resorts, information technology campuses, retail chains, golf courses, ports, and other hybrid spaces that exist outside normal constituencies and jurisdictions—in difficult political situations around the world. These spaces—familiar commercial formulas of retail, business, and trade—aspire to be worlds unto themselves, self-reflexive and innocent of politics. But as Easterling shows, in reality these enclaves can become political pawns and objects of contention. Jurisdictionally ambiguous, they are imbued with myths, desires, and symbolic capital. Their hilarious and dangerous masquerades often mix quite easily with the cunning of political platforms. Easterling argues that the study of such "real estate cocktails" provides vivid evidence of the market's weakness, resilience, or violence.

Enduring Innocence collects six stories of spatial products and their political cruise ship tourism in North Korea; high-tech agricultural formations in Spain (which have reignited labor wars and piracy in the Mediterranean); hyperbolic forms of sovereignty in commercial and spiritual organizations shared by gurus and golf celebrities; automated global ports; microwave urbanism in South Asian IT enclaves; and a global industry of building demolition that suggests urban warfare. These regimes of nonnational sovereignty, writes Easterling, "move around the world like weather fronts"; she focuses not on their blending—their global connectivity—but on their segregation and the cultural collisions that ensue.

Enduring Innocence resists the dream of one globally legible world found in many architectural discourses on globalization. Instead, Easterling's consideration of these segregated worlds provides new tools for practitioners sensitive to the political composition of urban landscapes.

Genres: Architecture, Theory, Nonfiction, Politics, Urbanism

Hardcover

First published November 1, 2005

About the author

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale University. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity. Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg Press, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. An ebook essay, The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo’s TED Talk (Strelka Press, 2012) previews some of the arguments in Extrastatecraft.

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 and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999) which applied network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure.

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’s research and writing was included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and she has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Rotterdam Biennale, and the Architectural League in New York. 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.

Reviews

[rururu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked the "Franchise" chapter, interesting comparison between the spiritual organization and commercial golf courses

[g · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is an attempt to uncloak networks of power via focusing on sites that may appear to be situated at the fringes. Yet the overwhelming amounts of data on each site limit the depth of the book, and therefore its value is derived of its curatorial capacities more than anything else. At times Easterling's preferred method of analysis results in unsubstantiated redundancy, where the reader is bogged up in phrases that do not necessarily correspond to useful analytical tools. The reader is exposed to many quotes that remain unexamined, and thus the quotes are to create a frame that the reader will be encouraged to read through.

Even though I would have enjoyed more in-depth discussions of the significant matters at hand, I should admit that the author's emphasis on how architecture is part and parcel of the networks of power that are disclosed in the book should be praised. I especially enjoyed the chapter entitled 'Park,' though I am not sure why this chapter should deserve this title. Also, the part on high-rise demolitions, where she discusses Controlled Demolition Inc., is very interesting.

[Marty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Keller Easterling is one of the "names" of contemporary architectural writing. She often deals with an incredible range of disciplines and subjects.

Strengths:

-Analysis of the contemporary flows & movement of capital and development projects.

-Broad writing that touches on a lot of interesting subjects and areas of study.

-Attempt to make the book non-linear by theme, incorporating a hypertext concept to her various chapters. I read it straight though but i liked her attempt.

-Design, the book is designed very nicely.

Weaknesses:

-I get a sense of an elementary understanding of political economy.

-As much of academic writing, there is a tendency to drop into jargon-land and buzz-wording off into oblivion.

Overall:
The book looks great and touches on a number of contemporary problems in the social sciences. Lots of food for thought and the references and quotes are often pretty cool.

Check out Keller Easterling's Organization Space if you like this one

[S.E. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been reading this one for a while. I took a class with her called Globalization Space: 12 Urban Landscapes. It was probably the most interesting class I've ever taken. Here she develops global architecture in ways that the term is not usually understood-in context of the hyperbole that global environments have become. Architecture is seen as more than a single structure, it is a way of organizing a total structural/ economic sphere.

[Rudy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm really enjoying reading about tourism and architecture and this book is an incredibly fascinating but very slow read. The author gets into the economic, political, and social reasons behind certain types of construction or buildings (what she calls "spatial products") and their evolution. It's a lot about cruises, golf courses, and hotels, but seen in a very poetic way.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides useful and provocative tools for considering "spatial products" as part of much larger networks of power and politics. I especially enjoyed the section on error which explores the notion of error as productive event. At times I felt the language was a bit too poetic for the subject matter.

[Iben · Rating 5 out of 5]

This woman has the best vocabulary EVER.