At a moment of digital ubiquity, it may be easier to treat the data from digital platforms as primary in contemporary innovation and to believe that, if coated with sensors in an internet of things, the stiff, dumb world will suddenly become responsive and ±smart.ε But the heavy lumpy components of space are themselves information systems that don═t really need digital devices to make them dance. So, since architecture and urbanism are making radical changes to the globalizing world, space may be an underexploited medium of innovation. Like those media theorists who are returning to elemental understandings of media as surrounding environments of air, water, or earth, medium design uses a spatial medium to rehearse this habit of mind and prompt innovative thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems.

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 recent e-book essay is titled Medium Design (Strelka Press, 2017). Another recent book, Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse. Other books include: Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005) and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Her research and writing was included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Architecture Biennales. She lectures and exhibits internationally.

This event is open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff. 

View the full Fall 2018 Lectures and Events List.