Enduring Innocence

A bracing and timely approach…. It frees us from the bankrupt notion that, as designers, we can merely venture to consider ethics and aesthetics as zero-sum alternatives.

[Easterling] successfully shows how organizational logics are providing generic specification for assembling spaces for North Korean tourism, Spanish high-tech agricultural landscapes, East Asian container ports, Indian IT (information technology) campuses, golf courses, retail franchises, pirates, and terrorism around the world.

Keller Easterling’s Enduring Innocence charts a tour of the guilty pleasures of post-global network protocols…. Keller Easterling makes global capital palpable.

Enduring Innocence is a subtle and poetic mediation on the state of the contemporary world. The book exhibits the author’s virtuosity in sifting through diverse landscapes…. The many urbanisms thus exposed provide us with a precise and complex platform for unraveling the nature of the global everyday.

… Enduring Innocence is truly a tour de force tour-guide for today because it doesn’t wield its case studies and field trips as paradigms that we should all now imitate (or even, morally avoid). Don’t bother looking for a contemporary Acropolis. It isn’t here. There is no easy prescription in Easterling’s parables. No clear moral waters to wade through in the knowledge that it’s only a Disney ride, that the sharks won’t bite, and the mermaids will triumph.

Enduring Innocence makes three contributions to architectural discourse and more broadly to critical enquiry. It brings a new perspective to both visible and invisible objects, articulates a methodology commensurate with the questions posed, and speculates on the multiple guises that politically informed architectural intervention might take.

Keller Easterling is Associate Professor, Yale University School of Architecture. She is the author of Organization Space (MIT Press, 1999).

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