Premise
This issue of the Journal of Architectural Education explores the environment of the desert in its geopolitical, infrastructural, and aesthetic dimensions, acknowledging that deserts continue to transform architectural imagination and collective intelligence.
The word desert—from the Latin desertum, left, abandoned, and withdrawn—has been exploited for centuries as a reductionist trope to evoke desolate ecosystems where hostile climatic circumstances and extreme temperatures prevent life from thriving. Eurocentric and Western perspectives especially have mischaracterized deserts as precarious and dangerous wastelands, often connoted with mystical, exotic, and sublime dimensions, enabling violent occupations, extractive campaigns, and colonialist expansions. Centuries of environmental racism have extracted, excluded, and exploited desert territories and desert communities, exacerbating conflicts across the most contested regions of the planet to this day.
And yet the desert resists as a site of richness and complexity. Some of the earliest and most enduring civilizations emerged and prospered within these supposedly desolate environments. Deserts are sites of immeasurable vastness, entangled with deep time and the magnitude of the Earth, host to numerous forms of living, from minerals to insects, plants to animals, and humans. Contemporary deserts unravel divergent and often diametrically opposed typologies of inhabitation, from nomadic camps to military bases, ancestral cities to agricultural civilizations, industrial complexes to illegal resorts, utopian communities to logistical epicenters, silently developing into one of the most decisive battlefields where anthropization and spatial conflicts pose existential threats to human and nonhuman life.Footnote1
At this crucial moment, as deserts encompass new territories, attract new settlements, and assemble new constituencies, we offer this issue in solidarity with desert dwellers, thinkers, designers, and advocates, as a companion to already robust desert scholarship and as a platform for recentering design, pedagogy, and architectural practice in such a context.Footnote2
Beyond reductive readings of deserts as conceptual abstractions or conditions of scarcity, this collection seeks to unravel a wide-ranging diversity of resources beneath the deserts’ alleged homogeneity.
A Constellation
We imagined this Journal of Architectural Education issue as a nonlinear constellation of ecological, spatial, cultural, and critical interpretations. Researchers, educators, and practitioners from different geographies offer a multiplicity of voices, sharing their diverse insights and theoretical approaches, building interventions, and pedagogical experiments. Their perspectives are presented in different modalities, including academic essays, critical narratives, design analyses, alternative cartographies, and visual images.
In dialogue with the constellation of peer-reviewed content is a series of short interviews with architects and scholars who have actively contributed to desert studies through their long experience in the field or through influential research and critical investigations, correlated with additional visual material that will be uploaded in the coming months on the JAE website.
A New Cartography
Several contributions call for an alternative, dissident cartography to demystify and counter-map the imperial and colonial constructions of the desert. The maps presented in the volume serve as instruments for learning, understanding, teaching, and practicing the architecture discipline differently. Maps and surveys have historically been leveraged for othering the desert biome, its spatial and social features, and its living and nonliving forms. The colonial project used cartography to classify the desert as an empty wasteland: a deficit environment suitable for occupation by its exploitative juridical, military, financial, experimental, and environmental regimes’ erasure.
As architects, educators, researchers, scholars, and activists, we must produce an alternative cartography against the settler system of representation. A new cartography is to think of the desert otherwise. It is not a simple, accurate description of the world but rather a diagram of the forces and power relations at stake, able to make visible and empower its living concatenations, collective alliances, hidden resources, and shared potentials, to conjecture strategies of refusal and reparation, and to reinforce trajectories of emancipation.
As Danika Cooper writes, drawing and redrawing the desert “from a critical, anti-colonial, justice-oriented lens has the potential to radically reconceptualize and restructure the desert as a world of radical social and ecological justice.”Footnote3 Questioning the controversial definition of “dryland” and its systematic absence from traditional architectural and landscape disciplines, Cooper’s studio proposes the formulation of a “dryland archive,” offering an enriching counterhistory of the 1922 Colorado River Compact to highlight the nuanced uses of lands and dwelling characterizing the vast territory across the seven signatory dryland states.
Similarly, Piper Bernbaum and Zach Colbert critique the modern “construction” of the Negev/Naqab Desert, which imposed concepts of equality and collective living, organization, and agriculture that entirely ignored the preexisting complex imaginary, ecologies, and cultural diversity that inhabited those territories for centuries. Mapping becomes crucial in identifying the connection between life and resources, individual and collective, and the architectural dimension concerning its regional and territorial scale. As they claim, if maps have been instruments of colonization to superimpose narratives, histories, and rationales on the territory, then their research with students attempted “to un-map” the Negev/Naqab, revealing “lost or excised narratives and conditions of erasure,” while unfolding old threads and new relationships between the desert and its inhabitants.
On the other hand, Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich looked closely at the desert through detailed microsections of the soil of the Mezquital Valley, working to understand it as a complex network of multifarious living forms from the molar to the molecular scale (visible and invisible, human and nonhuman) through its specific characteristics—temperature, moisture capacity, pH levels, and compaction—to reimagine how to interact with the land. “There are no heroes in the soil” as everything depends on something else: rather than drawing a conglomeration of sand, silt, and clay, their cartographic sections attempt to unfold a “relational network” in which these elements become agential in the soil.
As the artist Abdessamad El Montassir reminds us: “When we cross this vast desert, the plants and the mountains remember our traces and our stories spread into places we have not yet traveled through. An unknown part of us lives in this desert, and an unknown part of this desert lives in us.” Footnote4 Developing new cartography implies reconceiving how to map and record information often invisible, non-legible, or ungraspable by conventional media or institutional instruments, such as the infrastructure of memory, oral histories, performative traditions and rituals, temporal and embodied knowledge. Relatedly, in his essay, Julien Lafontaine Carboni draws from research and interviews in Sahrawi refugee camps, retracing the architectural crafts and transmissions devised across centuries of nomadic dwelling in the desert, challenging the notion of the archive with that of the repertoire, able to introduce physics, logic, and grammars of remembrance beyond the hegemonic requirement of legible proofs of judiciary and nation-state paradigms.
Questioning the Colonial Imagination
But a new cartography also detects and reveals other mediums contributing to toxic narratives, archives, and visual material, such as photography and film, which heavily contributed to constructing and disseminating a Western colonial imagination of the desert as an empty, arid wasteland. It contradicts the fabrication of the desert as a witness to an allegedly verdant and fertile past: a primordial, Edenic garden, to be recovered through technocratic interventions at all costs.
Along these lines, Dalal Alsayer’s essay recounts the Western manipulation of the Saudi Arabian Desert’s image by the Aramco company—manufactured by the combination of aerial photographs, maps, and popular magazines—where the alleged desolation of the local communities had to be replaced by a well-irrigated and blooming modernity, in parallel to the expansion of oil exploitation and mechanized urbanization. In his essay, Andy Lee reveals how the movies produced by the US Bureau of Mines were instrumental in reimagining the the Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority in Afghanistan as an extension of the American territory.
Echoing the conceptual premises of the whole issue, Faysal Tabbarah gathers a series of disparate episodes from travel literature, nineteenth-century French paintings, historical events, popular culture, and scientific findings. Tabbarah’s contribution composes a brief history of the problematic Orientalist discourse around the notion of aridity in the context of Southwest Asia and North Africa, elucidating the Western construction of a specific environmentalist representation that reduced the heterogeneous tapestry of desert landscapes to a generic dry, worthless land, inhabited by inept Indigenous populations.
Ivan L. Munuera argues that the Western architectural imaginary is indebted to the desert via complex entanglements of aesthetic transference, chemical imbrications, exoticization, and queer temporalities enacted by the marginalized subjects of the Bauhaus. Albeit geographically distant, the desert is excerpted in the institution’s interiors, and its proxy, the cactus, is revealed as an unlikely object of obsession for early modernists.
Architecture, Buildings, and Infrastructure
Architecture offers a fundamental opportunity to learn and understand how people dwell in and with the desert, drawing spatial and material connections between desert landscapes, ecologies, climates, materialities, human needs, cultural practices, and identities.
The Samburu’s manyatta circular settlements analyzed by Brendan O’Neill and Samantha L. Martin, for example, reveal the ingenious living of a nomadic-pastoralist population, the sophisticated use (and reuse) of material, and the balanced coexistence with domesticated animals, composing an architecture as a “system of entangled understandings, spaces, and structures, rather than isolated forms.”
Consider these alongside the Moroccan agadirs, collective granaries across the High Atlas to the Sirwa and the Saharan shores of the Oued Noun region, comprised of cellular rooms clustered together in a communal enclosure, which the architect and anthropologist Salima Naji has been assiduously restoring for the past twenty years. The granaries preserve not just precious goods—seeds, dried fruits and vegetables, lentils, dates, vegetables, roots, oils, property deeds, jewelry, tools, and weapons—but, above all, traditional construction techniques, religious rituals, and memories.
Nevertheless, architecture has also contributed to ideologically solidifying the settler representation of the desert in concrete spatial forms. Dante Furioso discusses a nineteenth-century military campaign to conquer the Patagonian territories primarily inhabited by Indigenous populations that resulted in the genocide of Mapuche and Telueche people and the expansion of private rural estancias. The campaign was reenacted and developed further under Manuel Fresco’s authoritarian governorship in Buenos Aires and in infrastructural works by the architect Francisco Salamone between 1936 and 1940.
From a similar perspective, Margaret Freeman discusses how the Qal’at al-Jafr castle, built after World War I by the Huwaytat Bedouin leader Auda abu Tayeh in the Jordanian desert, was coopted a decade later under the British Mandate, appropriated as an instrument to exert and extend military surveillance over the desert territories and Indigenous populations. Strategically positioned around water wells and reservoirs, the domineering structure was later converted into a prison for housing dissidents affiliated with leftist, nationalist, and Communist parties, and later, in cooperation with the CIA, affiliates of al-Qaeda and ISIS.
The political role of representation in articulating the settler apparatus is revealed in Alvaro Velasco Perez’s essay about the Spanish colonial government in Northwest Africa during the first half of the twentieth century. Here the connections between geological surveys, the displacement of Sahrawi populations, phosphate extraction, and the erection of ill-defined borders of sand are embedded in the geopolitical construction and control of the desert territories, which forced nomadic populations into refugee camps while making infrastructure fluid, architecture mobile, and military control pervasive.
The Appropriation of the Desert
Other authors focused on deserts as ideological battlefields in which Western powers violently uprooted, seized, and manipulated local cultures and complex imaginaries to reinscribe them into an expansionist logic of profit and exploitation.
Gabrielle Printz’s essay unravels the perceived ‘plasticity’ of the desert, threading relationships between the multinational corporate logistics of DuPont, the legacy of oil extraction, and its byproducts across the Iranian desert. The desert is revealed as an appropriated context where architectural imagination and capitalist aspirations of progress collaborate to construct new worlds, embodied in polyester, women’s tights, and the invention of a lifestyle through sophisticated media, film, and advertisement campaigns. Architects here participate not only in the design of physical space but also in the construction of references in and of the desert, as Printz writes: “the relatively minor part played by architects Moira Moser (Khalili) and Nader Khalili in this process are also curiously cast in terms of plasticity, something they attributed to the landscape and its capacity for change.”
The desert landscape, with its particular granularity and its material entropy, has been used as simulation proxy for play and warfare simultaneously. Tamar Zinguer documents the ubiquitous practice of sampling the desert to imagine scenarios—as artistic practice, as play space, and as militaristic strategy. To excerpt the desert in a sand box isolating it from ecological and cultural embodiments highlights the promiscuity of the term and of its perceptions which are removed from its lived realities.
While US interests in deserts have perpetuated a pervasive military-industrial presence outside the country, a similar attitude has led to remaking the domestic desert context as a proxy for its parallels abroad. Through an in-depth historical analysis of California City in the Mojave Desert, Ezgi İşbilen argues that the planned city in the desert borrows similar strategies of military assimilation, othering deserts as generic spaces waiting to be ‘developed.’ Architects, including Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, worked with the developer Nat Mendelsohn to use architecture as an ideological framework attempting to ground a modern settler society in physical terms, designing “a scaled replica of the Eiffel Tower and the monumental glass box, [which was] equally dismissive of the context.”
Patty Heyda’s contribution highlights the invention of parallels between the desert as a concept, and specific conditions in urban neighborhoods that have been systematically marginalized, as a tool for further exclusion and disinvestment in communities of color in the US. In “Food Desert – Feeding the Regional Economic Imaginary,” Heyda centers the racialized history of a specific community in St Louis, while contextualizing it within the larger neoliberal practice of ‘redevelopment’ through the construction of large-scale corporate logistical distribution centers in locations considered ‘deserts’ of sorts – ‘food deserts,’ ‘mobility deserts,’ ‘desolate.’
Together, the contributions illuminate the desert as not only an actively constructed site but also as an actively fabricated condition, positioning it as a site of resistance against the logic of occupation and displacement, violence and extraction, precariousness and erosion, and an enduring place of cultures, rituals, poetics, mythologies, imaginaries, alliances, and forms of living. Thus, far from offering definitive solutions, comprehensive scenarios, or scientific categorizations of the desert condition, the following constellation reflects questions and points of view to dismantle its colonial representation, imagination, and appropriation, while suggesting lessons for the architectural discipline, an urgent pedagogic mission for the present, and an alternative, more equitable, trajectory for the future.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ersela Kripa
Ersela Kripa is an associate professor and Director of Texas Tech University Huckabee College of Architecture – El Paso and Director of Projects at POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies). Located on the U.S./Mexico border, she maps trans-border ecologies, urbanism, and infrastructures, exposing binational systems of control that affect human rights. Kripa is a registered architect and co-founder of the research and design practice AGENCY. Kripa’s book, FRONTS: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (Oro Editions, 2020), written with Stephen Mueller, uncovers the geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies it simulates. Her awards include the Rome Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and an Emerging Voice award from the Architecture League of New York.
Francesco Marullo
Francesco Marullo is an associate professor at the UIC School of Architecture interested in the relations between architecture and abstraction, labor, and the space of production. He holds a Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture from the Delft University of Technology and The Berlage Center and is a founding member of the research collective The City as a Project. He co-authored Tehran: Life within Walls (2018); co-edited The Architecture of Logistics (2018); contributed to the volume Work, Body, Leisure (2018) and The Contested Territory of Architectural Theory (2022); and recently edited a thematic section of Log (2022) on the North-American deserts. A selection of his writings will soon be translated as Arquitectura Gènerica y Trabajo Vivo (2023).
Stephen Mueller
Stephen Mueller is an associate professor at Texas Tech University Huckabee College of Architecture – El Paso, and Director of Research at POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies). Located on the U.S./Mexico border, he maps trans-border ecologies, urbanism, and infrastructures, exposing binational systems of control that affect human rights. Mueller is a registered architect and co-founder of the research and design practice AGENCY. Mueller’s book, FRONTS: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (Oro Editions, 2020), written with Ersela Kripa, uncovers the geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies it simulates. His awards include the Rome Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and an Emerging Voice award from the Architecture League of New York.
Notes
1 Today, deserts cover 33 percent of the land surface of the planet, including cold and hot deserts on every continent (considering 41.3 percent of the global surface as drylands, UN-Habitat estimates a total of 2.1 billion people living in deserts, with a growth rate faster than that of any other ecozone). With climate change and its resultant migrations, this arid geography’s extent, form, and population will shift dramatically in the coming decades.
2 See e.g. Samia Henni, Deserts Are Not Empty (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022); Léopold Lambert, “The Desert: Introduction,” The Funambulist 44 (November–December, 2022); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Catrin Gersdorf, The Poetics and Politics of the Desert: Landscape and the Construction of America (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009); Vittoria Di Palma, Wasteland: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Diana K. Davis, The Arid Lands: History, Power, Knowledge (Cambridge–London: The MIT Press, 2016); and the work of the Desert Futures Collective at the Yale MacMillan Center, (https://desertfutures.yale.edu).
3 Danika Cooper, “Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds,” in Henni, Deserts Are Not Empty, 82.
4 Abdessamad El Montassir, Galb’Echaouf, 2020.