April 15, 2026
Keller Easterling | Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture, Yale University
Clarkson Chair Lecture
6:00 pm to 7:00 pm • Hayes Hall - Room 403
ATTTNT: A Land Reparations Infrastructure, 2025
Website team: Keller Easterling, Alvin Ashiatey, Bianca Ibarlucea, Nicholas Arvanitis, Hima Goburru, Elis Huang, and Rebecca Mqamelo
Keller Easterling is an architect, writer, and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. She is currently working on a book about land activism in the U.S. after the Civil Rights Movement. Her most recent book, "Medium Design" (Verso, 2021), considers not only the design of things but also the design of the way things go together. Another recent book, "Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space" (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity.
The Mix is All
Alternative approaches to design disrupt some habitual white/modern/Enlightenment approaches to the world’s intractable dilemmas—from climate cataclysm to inequality to concentrations of authoritarian power. Rather than a cultural firmware that favors singular solutions, monocultures, and binaries, solutions are mistakes, and ideologies are unreliable markers. Rather than the modern desire for the new, innovations are emergent relationships between emergent and incumbent technologies. Encouraging entanglement, these approaches do not try to eliminate problems but instead put them together in productive combinations. Errors and failures are information-rich resources and opportunities. There is strength in difference, impure coalitions, and an unpredictable dissensus that keeps power guessing and disoriented. The mix is all.
No Normal, 2020
GIS mapping, Keller Easterling and Laura Pappalardo
Other books by Easterling include "Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades" (MIT, 2005), which researches familiar spatial products in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world; "Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America" (MIT, 1999), which applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure; and "Subtraction" (Sternberg, 2014), which considers building removal or how to put the development machine into reverse.
Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist Fellow in Architecture and Design. She was also the recipient of the 2019 Blueprint Award for Critical Thinking. Her MANY project, projected global commons for facilitating migration through an exchange of needs, was exhibited at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her research and writing on the floor comprised one of the elements in Rem Koolhaas's Elements exhibition for the 2014 Venice Biennale.
Image of Keller Easterling.
Easterling is also the co-author, with Richard Prelinger, of "Call it Home: The House that Private Enterprise Built," a laserdisc/DVD history of U.S. suburbia from 1934–1960. She has published web installations, including "Extrastatecraft, Wildcards: A Game of Orgman, and Highline: Plotting NYC." Easterling has exhibited at the Henry Art Gallery, the Istanbul Design Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Rotterdam Biennale, the Queens Museum, and the Architectural League. She has lectured and published widely in the United States and abroad. Journals to which she has contributed include Domus, Artforum, Grey Room, Cabinet, Volume, Assemblage, e-flux, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, and ANY.