Reyner Banham describes his Scenes in America Deserta (1968) as a “very personal book,” which means that he examines why he, an English architectural historian, finds the Mojave Desert to be so appealing. Throughout the book, and in various ways, he asks himself how he might get out from under the weight of an education and a training that has taught him to view the world as a voyeur, to see even the desert through a pane of glass that requires him to apprehend it as visual, but to never really know it. He comes close to escaping himself only once in this book. Having discovered what appears to be evidence of the death of an acquaintance, a desert-dweller whose possessions are scattered about, Banham breaks down sobbing. In facing what the desert is capable of, he disintegrates; once again, the desert is rendered as both empty and hostile.
Banham never stumbles across the inverse: what is done to the desert and its inhabitants. He never encounters the desert as that space in which dangerous, polluting experiments are left in the open—what Samia Henni refers to as the production of toxicity and the mechanisms of coloniality. Flying out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, located in the 8,000-year-old Chihuahuan Desert, one can easily view the ATLAS-1 (Air Force Weapons Lab Transmission-Line Aircraft Stimulator), a.k.a. Trestle, on Kirtland Air Force Base. It is hard to miss. Twelve stories tall, 1000 feet long, using 6.5 million board feet of lumber, it was once the world’s largest structure comprised of wood and glue laminate. From 1980 to 1991, it was used to test the effects of a nuclear explosion’s electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) on large-scale aircraft. It sits empty in the desert now: a fire hazard, an open secret.
This proverbial pane of glass existed to assure Banham that there was a critical distance between what he witnessed and what occurred in the desert, but such distance has never existed. The proliferation of above-ground nuclear tests from 1955 to 1980 increased carbon-14 in the atmosphere: this could be measured in, among other places, human tooth enamel. The Anthropocene is very much within us because, among many reasons, the US determined that “the racialized lands of the American deserts were uninhabited (or unimportantly inhabited,)” and then “systemically stripped of their material and ideological worth” by the multiscalar project of nuclearism, as Traci Brynne Voyles has observed.Footnote1
Writing on these forces is abundant today and, critically, is being produced by authors both positioned within these environments and ancestrally tied to them. This volume joins a chorus of brilliant books, articles, and collections that directly challenge the colonial, wastelanding gaze that has attempted to render deserts as silent, or spoken for. Our hope for this issue is that it has a material impact on architectural education: that the references included here, either in the texts or in the endnotes, become central to a reframing or rethinking of a lecture or reading list. If a studio takes up a desert as a studio site or topic, our hope is that the organizers do this in collaboration and conversation with the communities that live in that space, and with an awareness of the centuries of inhabitation of Indigenous people and the structures and infrastructures they have built. Above all, let us remember that what happens to our deserts, happens to all of us; there is no distance between ourselves and our deserts.
Notes
1 Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 10–11.