McLean, VA (PRWEB) April 15, 2014
The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) is pleased to announce that Keller Easterling, architect, urbanist, author and professor at Yale Universitys School of Architecture, will deliver the keynote address at EDRA45NewOrleans on May 29, 2014 at the Astor Crowne Plaza. Conference attendees represent EDRAs broad membership of architects, urban planners, designers, environmental psychologists, landscape architects, social ecologists, urban anthropologists, geographers, researchers, consultants, policymakers, artists, academics and students from 27 countries around the globe.
Keller Easterlings critical work will be included in the 2014 Venice Biennale, and has been exhibited at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Rotterdam Biennale, and the Architectural League in New York. The topic of her keynote presentation, Extrastatecraft: The Powers of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure networks of space as a medium of polity and builds upon her earlier book Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades
EDRA45NewOrleans addresses a critical range of research and design methods through presentations from some of Environment-Behaviors most innovative researchers, designers, place makers, community builders, and scholars, said Rula Awwad-Rafferty, 2013-2014 Environmental Design Research Association Chair. We are thrilled to welcome Keller Easterling to our conference, and hear her perspective on how our spatial knowledge and design can lead to and reveal innovative ways of anticipating, accepting, absorbing, and reacting to change.
Easterlings keynote, “Extrastatecraft: The Powers of Infrastructure Space,” examines the repeatable formulas and spatial products that make most of the inhabited space in the world. Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of this infrastructure space. Infrastructure space, with the power and currency of software, is something like an operating system for shaping the city. Easterling asserts that exposing evidence of this infrastructural operating system and activity is as important as acquiring skills to hack into it.
Can building with change, in fact, provide opportunity for even greater environmental, social, and economic health and stability? EDRA45NewOrleans focuses on asking deep questions and propelling new research methods and design strategies for the human habitation within our dynamic environment. Conference themes weave together 12 tracks, revealing diverse layers, spheres, and manifestations to building with change, extending from resisting dynamic environmental forces to accepting and accommodating them.
Held over the course of four days in the heart of the French Quarter, EDRA45NewOrleans provides students, researchers, and practitioners alike the opportunity to participate in a collaborative discourse. For more information about EDRA45NewOrleans and to register, visit http://www.edra.org/edra45neworleans.
About EDRA:
The Environmental Design Research Association is an international, interdisciplinary organization founded in 1969 by architects and psychologists concerned with integrating people’s needs in shaping the built environment. EDRA exists to advance and disseminate environmental design research, thereby improving understanding of the inter-relationships of people with their built and natural surroundings toward creation and curation of environments responsive to human needs. For more information visit http://www.edra.org.