CARRIE EASTMAN is a writer and editor, designer, and educator who is the co-author of the forthcoming book, Occupation : Boundary, Art, Architecture, and Culture at the Water (ORO Editions, 2021), which explores the social, political, and cultural factors that contributed to the rise and fall of the urban waterfront. She is a co-editor of In Search of African American Space: Redressing Racism (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), a volume of essays in which African American spatial typologies are reconsidered. Carrie has taught courses in urban history and theory at the College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture in Tucson; her writing has appeared in that institution’s annual journal on contemporary themes in architecture.
Carrie practices landscape architecture independently after having spent fifteen years working in and around New York City. During this time, she contributed to large-scale public projects such as the Scenic Hudson RiverWalk Park in Tarrytown, New York, where upland meadows and productive wetlands were established on the site of a former asphalt plant; and early phases of the Marcha P. Johnson State Park, an important, publicly accessible, open space along the formerly industrial Williamsburg, Brooklyn waterfront. Smaller projects for private clients include the design of meadow and moss gardens in rooftop spaces for the Etsy Headquarters and plant design for a terrace space at the Fumihiko Maki 4 World Trade Center building.
IN SEARCH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN SPACE Redressing Racism
Edited by Jeffrey Hogrefe, Scott Ruff with Carrie Eastman, Ashley Simone
Lars Müller Publishers
If African American experience emerges from the structure of slavery, how does architecture relate to that experience? Rather than seek affirmation from a Eurocentric discipline that has regulated and excluded them from its study and practice, African Americans have claimed space in unexpected locations such as the slave ship, the slave plantation cabin, and in the urban “slum/ghetto.” In Search of African American Space examines these typologies in the context of historical record and personal and collective memory to uncover where African Americans have appropriated the practice of the everyday for themselves and where they have claimed spaces of resistance as their own. African American space is often a subversive interpretation of space that takes the form of speech and performance, reflecting its fleeting nature. This anthology compiles essays from contemporary architects, historians, and artists in order to present a broad range of knowledge and practices and in order to evoke consciousness of this form of space-making that persists in the afterlife of slavery.