Enduring Innocence

No one in the world excavates the politics linking globalization and architecture with the elegance and power of Keller Easterling. This vitally important book reveals like no other the deep plays of politics and power which shape today's sprawling and globally connected urban landscapes. A tour of franchises, logistics complexes, and technoparks, of offshore trade zones, airports, and erased downtowns, Enduring Innocence is a truly indispensable critique of the 21st-century landscapes of turbo-capitalism.

Stephen Graham, University of Durham

A bracing and timely approach.... It frees us from the bankrupt notion that, as designers, we can merely venture to consider ethics and aesthetics as zero-sum alternatives.

Thomas de Monchaux

Architect's Newspaper

[Easterling] successfully shows how organizational logics are providing generic specification for assembling spaces for North Korean tourism, Spanish high-tech agricultural landscapes, East Asian container ports, Indian IT (information technology) campuses, golf courses, retail franchises, pirates, and terrorism around the world.

Journal of Architectural Education

Keller Easterling's Enduring Innocence charts a tour of the guilty pleasures of post-global network protocols.... Keller Easterling makes global capital palpable.

Mason White

Archinect

Enduring Innocence is a subtle and poetic mediation on the state of the contemporary world. The book exhibits the author's virtuosity in sifting through diverse landscapes.... The many urbanisms thus exposed provide us with a precise and complex platform for unraveling the nature of the global everyday.

Vyjayanthi Rao

Constructs

... Enduring Innocence is truly a tour de force tour-guide for today because it doesn't wield its case studies and field trips as paradigms that we should all now imitate (or even, morally avoid). Don't bother looking for a contemporary Acropolis. It isn't here. There is no easy prescription in Easterling's parables. No clear moral waters to wade through in the knowledge that it's only a Disney ride, that the sharks won't bite, and the mermaids will triumph.

Shumon Basar

Domus

Enduring Innocence makes three contributions to architectural discourse and more broadly to critical enquiry. It brings a new perspective to both visible and invisible objects, articulates a methodology commensurate with the questions posed, and speculates on the multiple guises that politically informed architectural intervention might take.

Building Research & Information

Keller Easterling combines an ironic view of architecture with a series of brilliant offshore observations that signal the new global affair between construction and destruction. Her book is a dazzling antidote to the reigning pieties about globalization, and should be read by any serious student of global places, flows, and forms.

Arjun Appadurai, John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences, The New School, and author of Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization