Critical Spatial Practice 4 - Subtraction

Sternberg Press is pleased to announce the publication of Subtraction by Keller Easterling, the fourth book in the Critical Spatial Practice series edited by Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen. Keller Easterling will be in conversation with architect and professor Nikolaus Hirsch and e-flux journal editor Brian Kuan Wood for the book’s New York launch at e-flux. For the launch in Berlin, Easterling and Hirsch will join Juan A. Gaitán, curator of the 8th Berlin Biennale for a conversation at the Crash Pad c/o KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

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.