Space and Culture

Archinect : Urban Slot Machine : A conversation with Keller Easterling

Mason White: “[H]ow do you position your work and research alongside the historical trajectory of game, chance, and play in architecture and urbanism?”

Keller Easterling: “Urban design hails the power of the circumstantial, but it seems as if we still have very few techniques for designing within it. Urban design still often prefers control and even prefers the specification of building envelope as a means to that end. Game theory and political theory are not very different. They develop logics that are not designed to deal with deception and folly. Strange, since urban design and planning as they are accomplished every day, must dig their way out of a pile of circumstantial detail that is most sturdily arranged by bureaucracy. One wonders what opportunities or epidemics might appear if its administration was arranged in a more entrepreneurial fashion. The orgmen of the world are certainly operating within a gaming environment. Urbanism is a slot machine . . . The pirate and the comedian do the same thing: they upset the accustomed construct with extrinsic information or an incompatible logic or inversion. Spatial products are in constant battles with each other, killing each other or altering each other with an incompatible logic. A new marketing wrinkle or a tiny shift in desires can bring down an enormous organization. [Enduring Innocence] asks a question about whether we as architects are capable of making these ‘jokes.’ It seems like an opening worth pursuing in a myriad of different ways. To offer one example of an approach, I wrote a bit about a germ, a detail in the world that is designed but that propagates without complete control. The germ was offered as a joke to upset spatial logics…”

Easterling’s latest book is Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades