Organization Space: landscapes, highways, and houses in America, Keller Easterling

· aesthetic / geometric principles v. organizational expressions of spatial arrangements, as well as sites or agents of change within those organizations.

· 'to truly exploit some of the intelligence related to network thinking, an alternative position might operate from the premise that the real power of many urban organizations lies within the relationships among multiple distributed sites that are both collectively and individually adjustable.'

· 'this architecture is not about the house but rather about housekeeping... about timing, and patterns of inactivity, about triplets and cycles, subtractions and parallelism, switches and differentials.'

· 'though ageographic, the generic specifications for assembling offices, airports, highways, and many different kinds of franchises are also explicitly calibrated according to protocols for timing and interactivity. these protocols, whether generic or idiosyncratic are the dominant architectures in our culture of development — architectures privileging not the formal, morphological attributes of building, but rather a repertoire of operatives affected by time, patterns of connectivity, and changing populations of multiple components.'

· 'inventions born in eccentric conditions or elements that are accident prone — which are constantly creating volatility, difference, and conflict within development organizations — are smart in their own way. they produce space by adjusting organization.'

· 'if the most powerful sites are improvisational and responsive to the circumstantial changes of anarchical organizations, they are also suggestive of an active and inventive practice of architecture within some of the most common development protocols in America.'

· most interesting inventions bridge several disciplines, finding a cultural loophole within the dominant development formats.

· 'houses, cars, and their attending spaces were treated as products; land was a utility; and highways were landscapes.'

· Benton McKaye (1879-1975), as versed in earth sciences, expressed spatial attributes in organizational rather than formal or geometric terms.

· 'At a time when new networks associated with hydro-electricity and automobiles were being used as a means of galvanizing politics around very deterministic or techno-cratic principles, MacKaye expressed these technologies, for instance, as geological models that registered space against time and activity.'


· '... while he dealt with physical sites, he also constructed virtual sites — persuasions in his writings that positioned the practice itself as a tactical site of spatial production and adjustment.'


· '... applied network technologies, ... using the terms of network architecture to extend an understanding of interchanges parallel transportation networks, and roadside rights-of-way as sites for building intelligence into several transportation systems simultaneously.'


· 'electronic network intelligence relies on smart and flexible patterns of switching between heterogeneous components and multiple scales of activity. Multiplicity, differentiation, and diversity are understood to strengthen a network, and the smarter the system the more its operation runs counter to conventional notions of efficiency.'


· 'subtraction in an environment of exchange, however, may be a positive rather than negative means of negotiating space or removing obstruction.'