The whole idea of action being a carrier of information is something that comes directly from theater. That's, in some ways, the one thing I've been trying to contribute. I still write things outside of architecture - not really fiction, but not nonfiction. I like dialogue as a form, because the text is only the trace of an action. The consequential information is carried in the action you choose to put on that text.
Keller EasterlingIf you're steering a boat down a river, it's not something about which you can know that. You can only know how to do it. It's unfinished, it has no start-stop time, it's fluid. Practicality relies on indeterminate markers. It's just another kind of knowledge that's sexy, in a certain way. It's reactive, and often physical.
Keller EasterlingI thought architecture would offer a mix of the artful and practical. It seemed cooler than some of the other options in the university. The lights were on in the architecture school when I got out of rehearsal at night. And I thought the men were handsome.
Keller EasterlingI love making object form; I wish I was doing more of it. I admire the research of my colleagues, and sometimes it makes me sad when their beautiful work - the deep dives into formal research and nuances of geometry and so on - ends up circling in more and more circumscribed contexts. I wish they were more powerful. It's not a modern proposition. Active form doesn't kill object form. I want my students to have all those skills related to geometry, shape, measure, scale, etc., plus skills for using space to manipulate power in the world.
Keller EasterlingIn architecture, to do anything beyond object form is often treated as something extra-disciplinary - something outside the discipline that has nothing to do with art. So I'm making it clear that this is an artistic choice. It's not everyone's artistic choice. Some people should choose only to make object form because that's what gives them pleasure. But there are people for whom aesthetic pleasure comes from doing something else, and why would you deny that choice? It's another autonomous choice.
Keller EasterlingIt would never occur to me to map my research against events in my life, and the recent history of globalization seems to be part of someone else's life. Still, maybe I have been trying to fill in a history or address that amnesia for the recent past. There's so much that's opaque about the ways in which extra layers of global governance have developed since Pax Americana and really accelerated in these last thirty, forty years.
Keller EasterlingIt wasn't an architect who did this, but if it had been an architect, it would have been a good day's work: there was a marketing person who convinced Walmart that their products sold better in daylight than electric light. It would have been interesting if an architect had deliberately designed this change with all its spatial consequences in mind, thinking about how the change would multiply across all the square footage of all the roofs of all the Walmarts in the world. It would have been a beautiful trick - a physical, practical, political pleasure.
Keller Easterling