You Had to Be There

“You cannot have an answer to playing pool—you can only react to the next arrangement of the balls on the pool table. And a good player knows how to react to those conditions,” said Keller Easterling, as though to set up the title of the exhibition, It is Essential to be There that opens on February 1 at the Geoffrey Bawa Trust in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The title pulls from a quip by Sri Lankan architect Geoffrey Bawa about the importance of the site to design, and implicitly lays a case against the internationalization of architecture. Easterling was in conversation with Shayari De Silva, the curator of art and archival collections and organizer of the show.

Easterling primarily focused on her book Medium Design, asking, as architect Mitch McEwen of Atelier Office put in her review of the volume, “us to be aware of what we are doing and not doing in deep ways.” Easterling was de Silva’s professor (and, full disclosure, my classmate) in architecture school and it was probably not a coincidence that the book and the journal de Silva edited, Perspecta 51: Medium, shared a…