Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (review)

At the beginning of "the history of technology" there were sweeping, world-bracketing polemics like Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization and The Pentagon of Power, not to mention works by Jacques Ellul, Herbert Marcuse, and others. Whether or not one accepted all their premises, or followed each of their often-gratuitous prose loops, they were a necessary balance to the tendency of scholarship generally—including the history of technology—to craft transistor-sized topics stuffed with circuit-like footnotes. Then and now, many of those who study "technology" have had a bad and ultimately self-limiting tendency to seek out "the real" in things that are far too real to be, in the end, real. We would do well to learn a lesson our friends in architecture learned decades before, and that's to see the space between the walls.

Keller Easterling's Enduring Innocence helps us do that. This book by an assistant professor of architecture at Yale University will be frustratingly elusive and multi-sited for some readers, but the text rewards one's patience. Setting aside the idea of a stable, design-driven global architecture to concentrate on "spatial products," an architecture of data and logistics built by "orgmen," Easterling has produced an anti-coffee-table book in which architecture looks much more familiar, more political, and ultimately more relevant. This relevance extends to technology studies, because the "architecture" in the book includes ships, machines, biotechnology, and even satellite tracking systems. There is more than a little Mike Davis in Easterling's choices of locations and attitude, although she eschews his take-no-prisoners style for prose that owes more to anthropology than geography or even architectural studies.

Easterling takes us to a variety of liminal locations disturbing in their "innocence"—their enactment of politics under the pretense of simple re-landscaping. From the unlikely North Korean cruise-ship-linked resort of Mount Kumgang, to the never-built global infrastructure for peace of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, to the acres of plastic tomato greenhouses that cover southern Spain, to the automated warehouse landscape of Plano, Texas, Easterling's sites are both unlikely and yet central to the projects of global connectivity and corruption she means to critique. Golf courses, container ports, IT parks, and call centers are among the org-designed "spatial products" she wants us to see more clearly than we are ordinarily invited to—spaces rarely considered to be "architecture" at all. Her theoretical concerns extend well beyond space, however, even if they are consistently anchored there. She has as much to say, for example, on high-seas piracy as on demolition and urbicide, and even something about their connection.

The arrangement of Easterling's book is complex—perhaps overly so—with short theoretical essays separating empirical chapters, and marginal signposts inviting us to skip forward and backward rather than turn one page at a time. I surrendered to this suggestion that I skip around, and, while this may profit the reader with limited time and particular interests, I think it comes at the expense of the book itself. I don't like to see my bad habits reinforced. If someone is going to skip around in your book—as they inevitably will—better they be punished for it by being made to feel that they've missed something (which they generally have).

Architects (and professors of architecture) often have a hard time writing about topics more circumscribed than the world itself. This was true enough under modernity, and with the rise of postmodernity—although it began in Las Vegas—the will toward omnipresence has become, if this is possible, even less bounded. While modernist writing evoked everywhere but nowhere in particular, postmodern writing is a dense and finely textured travelogue; a complicated treasure map marked with real and specific places that are by turns exotic and mundane, or, ideally, mundanely exotic. "Globalization" may be the political masquerade under critique in much of this...