Visualizing the Desert

Abstract

This paper uses three different representations (aerial photograph, map, photograph) to shed light on how environmental imaginaries of the desert systematically created a “wasteland” that enabled an architecture of exploitation and extraction in which the histories, characteristics, and narratives of Saudi Arabia were replaced. Organized in chronological order, the images were produced in connection with US geologist Karl Saben Twitchell’s desire to extract resources from Saudi Arabia through his role as the Saudi King’s confidant and US expert. Here, representation and extraction allowed Twitchell and his company, Saudi Arabian Mining Syndicate, to frame the landscape as a “regime of emptiness” that enabled the systematic transformation of the Saudi desert.

Keywords:

• deserts
• Saudi Arabia
• representation
• environmental imaginaries
• wasteland

Notes

1 “Aramco Communities—Then and Now,” Arabian Sun and Flare, April 29, 1953: 2.

2 The author uses the term US in lieu of America/American in an attempt to decolonize the writing of histories. On this, see Samia Henni, “Norms and Forms of Dispossession: The Politics of Naming,” Pidgin 23 (February 2018): 16–29.

3 On Aramco, see Dalal Musaed Alsayer, “Anywhere, U.S.A.: Aramco’s Suburb in Saudi Arabia’s Desert,” in Deserts Are Not Empty, ed. Samia Henni (New York: Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, 2022), 269–314;Abd al-Raḥmān ibn ʻAbd Allāh Thāmir Aḥmarī, “Dawr Sharikat Al-Zayt al-ʻArabīyah al-Amrīkīyah (Arāmkū) Fī Tanmiyat al-Minṭaqah al-Sharqīyah Min al-Mamlakah al-ʻArabīyah al-Saʻūdīyah, 1363-1384 H/1944-1964 M : Dirāsah Fī Tārīkh al-Tanmiyah/دور شركة الزيت العربية الأمريكية (أرامكو) في تنمية المنطقة الشرقية من المملكة العربية السعودية، ١٣٦٣-١٣٨٤ ھ/١٤(The Role of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in the Development of the Eastern Province (K.S.A.), 1944-1964 : A Study in Development History)” (PhD Dissertation, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, King Saud University, 2007). Saʻd ibn Saʻīd ʻĀʼiḍ Qarnī, Al-Mamlakah al-ʻArabīyah al-Saʻūdīyah Wa-Sharikat Arāmkū, 1352-1401 H/1933-1980 M : Dirāsah Tārīkhīyah/المملكة العربية السعودية وشركة أرامكو، ١٣٥٢-١٤٠١ هـ/١٩٣٣-١٩٨٠ م : : دراسة تاريخية (Saudi Arabia and Aramco, 1352-1401 H/1933-1980: A Historical Study), Sixth Edition (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: al-Jamʻīyah al-Tārīkhīyah al-Saʻūdīyah (Saudi Historical Society), 2008). Chad H. Parker, Making the Desert Modern: Americans, Arabs, and Oil on the Saudi Frontier, 1933–1973 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015); Chad H. Parker, “Transports of Progress: The Arabian American Oil Company and American Modernization in Saudi Arabia,1945–1973” (PhD diss., Indiana University); Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010); Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007); Abdulaziz Alshabib and Sam Ridgway, “Aramco and Al-Malaz Housing Schemes: The Origins of Modern Housing in Saudi Arabia,” Histories of Postwar Architecture March 21, 2022, 147–66, https://doi.org/10.6092/ISSN.2611-0075/11738.

4 On Aramco’s housing hierarchies and approaches, see Alsayer, “Anywhere, U.S.A.”

5 Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge, (History for a Sustainable Future) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016); Diana K Davis and Edmund Burke III, eds., Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, Ecology and History (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011).

6 See Natalie Koch, “Sustainability Spectacle and ‘Post-Oil’ Greening Initiatives,” Environmental Politics 32:4 (September 27, 2022): 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2022.2127481.

7 On the role of the garden in Islam, see for example Emma Clark, Underneath Which Rivers Flow: The Symbolism of the Islamic Garden (London: Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture, 1996); D. Fairchild Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Sara Provins, “Islamic Gardens: Growing Cosmological Ideals,” The Fountain, July 1, 2003, https://fountainmagazine.com/2003/issue-43-july-september-2003/islamic-gardens-growing-cosmological-ideals; Chuanbin Zhou and Lanxi Guo, “Rose, Tulip and Peony: The Image of Paradise and the ‘Localized’ Islam in China,” Religions 11:9 (August 29, 2020): 444, https://doi.org/10.3390/rel11090444; Michelle Catherine Adlard, “The Garden as a Metaphor for Paradise” (Master’s thesis, Rhodes University, 2001).

8 See Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes.

9 Timothy Mitchell, afterword to Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2011), 266.

10 Samia Henni, “Against the Regime of ‘Emptiness,’” in Deserts Are Not Empty, ed. Samia Henni (New York, NY: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022), 1; emphasis in original.

11 Henni, “Against the Regime,” 18.

12 Wallace Stegner, Discovery! (Beirut: Middle East Export Press, Inc, 1971), 59.

13 Folder 6, box 22, Karl S. Twitchell Papers, Public Policy Papers, Mudd Manuscript Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (hereafter KST).

14 On Crane, see Norman E. Saul, The Life and Times of Charles R. Crane, 1858–1939: Businessman, Philanthropist, and a Founder of Russian Studies in America (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013).

15 See Jones, Desert Kingdom, particularly chaps. 2 and 4.

16 On how SoCal came to Saudi Arabia, see Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, reissue edition (New York: Free Press, 2008), chap. 15; Jones, Desert Kingdom, chap. 1; Irvine H Anderson, Aramco, the United States and Saudi Arabia: A Study of the Dynamics of Foreign Oil Policy, 1933–1950, 2014, 22–23.

17 Folder 7, box 1, Joseph D. Mountain Papers, National Air and Space Museum Archives (NASM), Acc. 1991–0079, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC (hereafter JDM).

18 Joseph D. Mountain, “Report of Aerial Reconnaissance, Saudi Arabia, 1936–1937,” pg. 1, box 3, JDM.

19 Mountain, “Report of Aerial Reconnaissance,” pg. 11, box 3, JDM.

20 Mountain, “Report of Aerial Reconnaissance,” pg. 12, box 3, JDM.

21 Laura Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, and Politics (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2013).

22 Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); see also Natalie Koch, “Wastelanding Arabia: America’s ‘Garden of Eden’ in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia,” Journal of Historical Geography 77 (2022): 13–24.”

23 See also Caitlin Blanchfield, “Envirotechnical Lands: Astronomy and Land Use on Maunakea,” in Technical Lands: A Critical Primer, ed. Jeffrey Nesbit and Charles Waldheim (Berlin, Germany: Jovis Verlag, 2022), 188–203.

24 Karl Saben Twitchell, Saudi Arabia: With an Account of the Development of Its Natural Resources, 3rd ed. reprint (New York: Greenwood Press, 1958).

25 Ahmed Omar Fakry and Karl Saben Twitchell, “Report of the United States Agricultural Mission to Saudi Arabia” (Cairo, Egypt: US Department of Agriculture, 1943).

26 Thomas Lippman, “The Pioneers,” Saudi Aramco World, June 2004; see also Parker, Making the Desert Modern.

27 Kurgan, Close Up at a Distance.

28 Denis E. Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, paperback ed. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 17.

29 Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye, 17.

30 Henni, “Against the Regime,” 20.

31 See for example Yahya Ahmed Mohammed Al Saad, “Ab’ād alṣora alṣaḥrawīa fī alqaṣida als’oodīa (Dimensions of the desert image in the Saudi poem),” Majallat Midad Alādab (Midad Al-Adab Magazine) 22 (2011): 43–62; ʿabd āllh ibn mḥmd bn rwās, shāʿirāt min al-bādīa (Female Poets from the Desert), Eighth Edition, vol. Part I (Sharjah, UAE: al-rāwy, 2002).

32 See for example Mahmoud Na’amneh, Mohammed Shunnaq, and Aysegul Tasbasi, “The Modern Sociocultural Significance of the Jordanian Bedouin Tent,” Nomadic Peoples 12:1 (2008): 149–63; Daniel Da Cruz, “The Black Tent,” Aramco World 17:3 (June 1966): 26–27.

33 See Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

34 The USDA mission is documented in detail in Jones, Desert Kingdom, chap. 2; Koch, “Wastelanding Arabia”; Fakry and Twitchell, “Report of the United States Agricultural Mission.”

35 See Natalie Koch, Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (London New York: Verso, 2022).

36 See Koch, “Wastelanding Arabia.”

37 Koch, 16.

38 Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 20th anniversary edition (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2008); Dianne Suzette Harris, Little White Houses: How the Postwar Home Constructed Race in America, Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture Series (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

39 Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 15.

40 King, The Bungalow, 1.

41 King, The Bungalow, 8.

42 Alsayer, “Anywhere, U.S.A.”; Alshabib and Ridgway, “Aramco and Al-Malaz Housing Schemes.”

43 Munira Khayyat, Yasmine Khayyat, and Rola Khayyat, “Pieces of Us: The Intimate as Imperial Archive,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 14:3 (November 2018): 282, https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-7025385.

44 See Paula Weathers, “Those Beautiful Green Lawns,” Al-Ayyam Al-Jamilah (Pleasant Days), Fall 1996.

45 See Diana K. Davis, “Indigenous Knowledge and the Desertification Debate: Problematising Expert Knowledge in North Africa,” Geoforum 36:4 (July 2005): 509–24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2004.08.003.

46 On this, see also Parker, Making the Desert Modern: Americans, Arabs, and Oil on the Saudi Frontier, 1933-1973 (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dalal Musaed Alsayer

Dalal Musaed Alsayer is an assistant professor of architecture at Kuwait University. Her research lies at the intersection of architecture, environment, and development in the context of Arabia during the twentieth century. She is the coauthor of Pan-Arab Modernism 1968–2008 (Actar, 2021) and the cofounding editor of Current: Collective for Architecture History and Environment (www.current-collective.org). She holds a B.Arch. from Kuwait University, postgraduate degrees from Columbia and Harvard, and a MSc and PhD in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. She is an academic visitor at St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford for the academic year 2022–23.