Critical Spatial Practice 4 - Subtraction: 04 (Sternberg Press / Critical Spatial Practice)

Keller Easterling

ISBN 10: 3956790464 / ISBN 13: 9783956790461

Published by Sternberg Press 2014-03-31, 2014

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-GRD-9783956790461

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Critical Spatial Practice 4 - Subtraction: 04 (Sternberg Press / Critical Spatial Practice)
• Publisher: Sternberg Press 2014-03-31
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3956790464
• ISBN 13: 9783956790461
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Metahaven
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Unbuilding is the other half of building. Buildings, treated as currency, rapidly inflate and deflate in volatile financial markets. Cities expand and shrink; whether through the violence of planning utopias or war, they are also targets of urbicide. Repeatable spatial products quickly make new construction obsolete; the powerful bulldoze the disenfranchised; buildings can radiate negative real estate values and cause their surroundings to topple to the ground. Demolition has even become a spectacular entertainment.

Keller Easterling's volume in the Critical Spatial Practice series analyzes the urgency of building subtraction. Often treated as failure or loss, subtraction—when accepted as part of an exchange—can be growth. All over the world, sprawl and overdevelopment have attracted distended or failed markets and exhausted special landscapes. However, in failure, buildings can create their own alternative markets of durable spatial variables that can be managed and traded by citizens and cities rather than the global financial industry.

These ebbs and flows—the appearance and disappearance of building—can be designed. Architects—trained to make the building machine lurch forward—may know something about how to put it into reverse.

About the Author

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