My name is Pierre Belanger.

I'm co-director of the MDes program with Kiel Moe.

We'd like to welcome you to the spring annual event of the MDes

program.

And we really appreciate you taking time out

of your schedules.

We're always trying to figure out

what is the sweet spot that you can

have a lecture in the spring, where

people don't start falling off and start getting exhausted.

So we really appreciate you taking time out

of your schedules to be with us, also

for a special lecture with Keller Easterling.

We'd like to provide a brief introduction

to Keller's lecture, and also in the context of the MDes program

that Kiel and I, as well as a group of coordinators

have been really working with Mohsen over the past few years,

developing a postgraduate research vision.

We've been trying to ask a few questions

over the past couple of years with a number

of different speakers.

The central one is this idea of what does support urban life.

And I'm going to try to capture your attention

against the background of these really repugnant images.

You don't have to look at me.

You can just listen.

What's been particularly important also

is to be able to answer this question in really

practical, and also at the same time, undisciplined ways.

Pedagogically, we've also been exploring

the role of representation as part

of the role of research as a way to advance

the postgraduate environment conducive to advance research

studies dealing with what we could consider the design

arts and the design sciences.

In that light, we're also looking

to try to understand how do we extend

and also stretch knowledge from the platform

of the core disciplines themselves.

Towards this effort, last year, we received blogger Jeff Menaw,

as well as designer Christien Meindertsma,

who spoke about her book PIG 05049.

And they both captured our imagination, as well as

our attention, asking fundamental questions

about the mediation of our environments

and the measures of our research methods--

how do we do research in design?

This year, we also advanced these pursuits

with films and filmmakers, including

the work of Jennifer Baichwal and Ed Burtynsky.

Almost the same time last year, their film Watermark

that was screened for the first time in Boston.

They explored the scales, technologies, infrastructures

of urbanization.

And earlier this fall, with filmmaker Raoul Peck

with this film Fatal Assistance, which

profiled the failure of international humanitarian aid

following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

So through these creators, innovators, Kiel and I,

along with the coordinators of the MDes program,

have been trying to explore also how video, film,

time-based representation factors a pivotal role

in the communication of research and dissemination of design

across the world, this possibility of being

able to make design and the communication of it

searchable and scalable.

Launching our 30th anniversary year

since the creation of the MDes program in 1985 and 1986,

we were fortunate to receive Keller Easterling this evening,

who will be in conversation with Charles Waldheim,

chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture;

John Irving, professor of Landscape Architecture,

as well as founding coordinator the urbanism landscape

and ecology concentration of the MDes program in 2009, 2010.

I'd like to say a few words about the context

of Keller Easterling's work over, really, the past two

decades.

There was a long list of reasons to invite you.

So Shantel asked me to contain this to five minutes.

So I'm going to try.

I think it's important to understand the work of Keller

Easterling over the past two decades

as emerging out of an extremely turbulent era

of the early 1990s and the late 1980s,

where the shock of digitalism and deconstructivism

that mark a kind of a [speaking french] transition

was nothing short of both structurally turbulent and also

at the same time, surprisingly, has

been overlooked as an era of tremendous exhaustive and

exhausting transformation.

As one of its most reflexive as well as preemptive thinkers,

Keller Easterling's work transcends

this groundbreaking change that was

occurring in the early 1990s.

Not only did she live in or did she

pass through this major period of transformation,

but in hindsight, she can be seen

as the soft heroine of a spatial avant garde

that we're now just beginning to understand two decades later.

As writer, urbanist, and architect at Yale,

we can argue that her work belongs not only in the fields

and forms of professional disciplines as we know them,

but we could also propose that her work belongs in an entirely

different time zone.

Influenced by early collaboration

with film archivist Rick Prelinger in New York,

her collaboration on the laser disc on suburbia, Call it Home.

Keller Easterling's preemptive work

on the landscape of interconnectivity

was later compiled in a book, Organization Space,

published by MIT Press in 1999.

It profiled researchers Patrick Geddes,

Benton MacKaye, which remarkably,

yet not unsurprisingly, comes out

of the shadows of the school of deconstructivist

though of the early 1990s that essentially marginalized

and overlooked environments, overlooked ecologies

and infrastructures, scales at which

can be recognized in her contemporary adoption

of landscape as support and system

for contemporary urban life.

Today, Easterling's observational empiricism

is not only accelerated algorithmically

over the past two decades; it's grown in significance and kind

with two follow-up books, Enduring Innocence, which

chronicles the rise of new spatial products,

as well as the rise of infrastructural effects

in the book that she'll speak about tonight, Extrastatecraft.

Retroactively-- and I realize-- I turned the page-- I only

have a half a page left-- retroactively,

the importance of Keller's work can also be seen on two levels.

She's attempted to overtly and indirectly correct

the course set in motion more than 40 years

go by so-called revolutionary architecture

of the 20th century, a course that, according to postmodern

theorist Charles Jencks proposed, and I quote,

"has not been healthy or good for the environment."

I'm quoting out of an article from Architectural Review

that Charles Jencks did on the evolution of architecture.

Reporting on the sexist and dogmatic arrogance

of the 20th century architect, according to Jencks in 1999--

and I quote again-- "the revolutionary century

has been dominated by men, and there are very few women

among the 400 protean creators gathered from other writers."

He's specifically referencing the diagram

that has been so famously recycled and been reiterated

in four or five different occasions as part of his work.

Moving forward-- and this is a rare moment of self-reflection

as part of Jenck's work on his own work-- Jencks

proposes-- and I quote again, from 1999--

"an urbanism both more feminine and coherent

would have been far superior to the over-rationalized and badly

related boxes that have formed our cities."

That's the end of the quote.

So between the bank art traditions of geography,

once considered, early beginning of the 20th century,

as girl science, and American cultural geographers,

such as Denis Cosgrove, JB Jackson,

Keller's work can be seen as injecting the field of urbanism

and the system of landscape as geographic subject

of critical importance by making a transitive, transdisciplinary

leap into the fields of design.

This leap is extremely important to understand

as part of her work over the past two decades.

And if her work seems to fall in between certain cracks,

it's only because of the distance

that certain divides have between disciplines

of architecture, economy, ecology, anthropology,

and engineering.

Easterling's eye crystallizes as what

preeminent human geographer Carl O'Sauer saw in 1963 in his book

Land and Life as the value of, what he quotes,

"being unspecialized," where her synthetic and telescopic

optic has enabled us to see urbanization

as both the stratification or the strata

and synthesis of power relations expressed

through different skills and spaces of information.

And we can see that as a transition

from her work dealing with organization space

to infrastructure space.

In some total, her work elucidates urbanism's chaos

and complexity, translating it for us-- and again,

quoting Sauer-- into a vocabulary of wider

and clearer intelligibility and where

power forms its foundations.

So I guess we can say, as the dean

of infrastructural thought, Keller's work

reveals the very nature and essence of infrastructure

that's realized as part of the process

of infrastructural products and effects

in her latest book Extrastatecraft-- The

Power of Infrastructure Space.

I'd just like to finish off with a quote from her book, which

I think captures both the work that she's

done over the past two decades, but also at the same time,

if you listen carefully, one can begin

to understand how to be able to predict the next two decades.

I'm quoting directly from her book Extrastatecraft.

"Infrastructure space is a form, but not

like a building is a form.

It's an updating platform unfolding in time

to handle new circumstances, encoding

the relationships between buildings or dictating

logistics.

There are object forms, like buildings, and active forms,

like bits of code and the software

that organizes building.

Information resides in the often undeclared activities

of this software-- the protocols,

the routines, the schedules, choices it manifests in space.

Marshall McLuhan's meme, transposed to infrastructure,

might be "the action is the form."

Please join us in welcoming Keller Easterling.

[applause]

Thank you, Pierre, for that introduction.

It's a pleasure to be here at this excellent place

with these exceptional faculty and exceptional students.

I'm showing you a bit of urban porn here.

And I'm sorry that was so distracting.

And in many ways, the book that I just finished

is meant to be a book in dialogue with people like you.

Some of my books and writings have really been reportage.

But Extrastatecraft is hoping to be an adventure in thinking,

and one that rehearses a habit of mind about design.

So you all probably know that I have long

been working on unfocusing eyes to see not only buildings

with shapes and outlines, but also the almost

infrastructural matrix space in which buildings are suspended.

That's not an infrastructure of pipes and wires

into the ground, but something like an operating system

for shaping the city.

And it's coded with laws and econometrics and informatics

and global standards and formulas

for making spatial products.

You know it.

You know it.

It's the cartoon of skyscrapers and turning radii and malls

and resorts and franchises and parking lots and golf courses

and airports and airport lounges and free zones.

Again, not an infrastructure that's hidden, far from it--

Something that's pressing into view

and looking the same, whether it's in Texas or Taiwan,

and telling emotional stories about Arnold Palmer golf

and Beard Papa cream puffs.

And this is, as you know, inner Mongolia.

And some of the most radical changes

to the globalizing world have been

written in the language of this matrix space,

so much so that it's become a de facto medium of polity.