Medium Design
Keller Easterling on the power of repeatable formulas, real estate propaganda, and a new spatial language.
This week we’re in conversation with one of our (and everyone else’s) favorite architects. Keller is easy to talk to about very complicated things. It’s so fun to hear her think. Enjoy.
This interview with Keller Easterling, architect, writer, and professor at Yale University, was conducted and condensed by Tatti Ribeiro for franknews.
How did you land on Medium Design, and what does that mean?
I didn't want it to be a thing or a term but something that takes you back to something you already know how to do – that doesn't really need a name.
It is essentially looking, not just at objects with names, but at the space between them. The potentials and capacities in how they interact with each other. Culture's really good at pointing to things and calling their name, but not so good at describing the relationships between things.. This book is looking at that, and positioning design as something that everyone does. Everyone is a designer of managing potentials.
This very ordinary faculty is underexploited. Both as a practical art and a political tool. It is exploited by political superbugs—the figures like Trump, Putin, Modi, or Bolsonaro— who know exactly how to work dispositions and temperaments that are undeclared. If you want be as good as these superbugs—who are working culture with props, lies, and scrambled ideologies— maybe you have to rehearse an ability to see with half-closed eyes these undeclared potentials, temperaments, and dispositions.
I am a non-specialist – you wrote about spatial language for the non-specialist. Can you tell me more about that?
Start from the simplest objects around you. This teacup has a handle that my fingers fit into, and the chair I'm sitting in corresponds to where my knee bends, and this chair also goes underneath the table. Even though these are inorganic, largely static objects, they are bristling with activity, and interacting with each other. They have potentials based on their shape and so on. That is a spatial language.
How does a non-specialist start to be more intentional in looking at objects and spaces this way?
I was hoping that by giving examples it would be clear that how you really operate in the world is by putting problems together. It's not really the solving of problems, but the integration of one problem with another.
I gave an example of parents with squabbling children. They don’t try to litigate what the children are saying. They, you know, introduce blood sugar into the system of one, they open a window, they introduce a pet into the arms of another – they are managing the dispositions of the room so that it no longer induces violence. In a practical way, we are all managing potentials all the time. This ability to manage potentials and put problems together is so much stronger than the search for solutions and the elimination of problems. Solutions are weak positions.
Our modern Enlightenment habit of mind is always looking for the solution or replacing the old with the new, instead of looking at how, for instance, new and existing technologies might be in smarter arrangements. Or how might you be attuned to the temperament of organizations—the degree of violence that organizations hold within them.
Can you give me an example of these organizations?
Violent organizations often segregate. Look at any city from the air and you see the highway that barreled through an area where people of color lived. Look at redlined neighborhoods or slum demolition around the world. That marooning, quarantining, or ghettoizing of neighborhoods kills the kinds of nourishing connections and mutualism that we've been talking about in this conversation.
Sometimes it is not graphic. There's no drawn sword or gunshot. It's structural violence or slow violence that erases, poisons or abuses you with sheltered wealth, data monopolies, or fossil fuels.
I often point to the Rana Plaza collapse -- the industrial disaster in the Dhaka export processing zone in Bangladesh. In this case, there was an event to mark the violence, but in thousands of other factories that don't buckle under the weight of their own denial, there's nothing to see. It's crucial to be able to detect embedded temperament—environmental or surrounding violence.
I thought it was really interesting how you talk about the reason for the success of these organizations is that they have the ability to replicate. To scale. It’s all formulaic. A repeatable formula you say.
A lot of the spaces I've looked at are what you might call spatial products -- from fields of Levittown houses to repeatable formulas for malls, resorts, cruises, golf courses, automated ports, or even entire cities.
I have been looking at these spaces, which are making some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world, and wondering whether we might know something about how to reverse engineer them.
And do we?
It's definitely whistling through the graveyard. But I have been wondering if, without colluding with capital, you might be able to short circuit and unwind it so that the abusive thing amplifies its own antidote? I'm asking if that is possible.
Look at mortgages that were an accelerant of the sprawling houses we were just talking about. As subprimes, they were also the cause of the global financial disaster. What if you grouped them in a different way. When grouped—not as 17,000 identical homes or subprimes— but rather according to climate risk, you can potentially create a protocol that puts the development machine into reverse.
This protocol is rehearsed in the book like the steps in a game. It looks at reasonable choices within this collectivity based on risk. What if one person did this or 10 did this? For those spatial products that have been germs of sprawl how do you make a counter contagion?
You mention Trump visiting North Korea and airing this commercial that is full of propaganda – not many people would connect mortgages to commercials so naturally – but when you write it out, it makes sense.
I have collected many of these three-minute urban porn videos like the one that Trump used—all part of the confidence game for creating free zone world cities all over the world. They always follow the exact same formula. They always start in outer space and drop down through clouds to identify the new center of the earth.
During the 2018 summit, Trump and Kim went for each other. They recognized each other. They both spoke the language of developer porn. And Trump’s video followed the formula to the letter— the solar system, the clouds, the whole thing. It only added little movie trailer shots of the two of them in starring roles.
Trump is using developer language to lead the free world. Real estate is everything.
It’s what we were saying about these superbugs. They are working the disposition. They've got all kinds of props, lies, scrambled ideologies, and divisive fights from which to harvest loyalties. In a way, it almost doesn't matter what they are just so long as they're changeable, so long as you can keep on changing them at a dizzying pace. The agility is all. The mix is all. Modi is doing the same thing.
Who were you hoping would find this book?
I want spatial variables to be part of conversations about politics and to be seen as crucial to global decision-making of all kinds. Beyond the anointed digital, legal, and econometric languages, a spatial language is crucial.
I’m also trying to expand repertoires of activism. Activism will always be marching, looting, uprising, agitating, sabotaging, sanctioning, and making any kind of pressure, usually in an oppositional fight. Not in place of those methods, but in addition to them, I want to provide some other undeclared techniques written in a spatial language that can sometimes fly under the radar. Superbugs are already good at this. Maybe our activism also has to create the kind of dissensus that keeps them guessing and disoriented. The declaration of singular evils and singular solutions just makes it easier for them.