Abstract
This studio course engages the thresholds, constructs, and narratives of the Negev/Naqab Desert and uses critical architectural practice to counter settler colonial perceptions of emptiness and unsettle the legacies of technocratic infrastructures while confronting the Western and Eurocentric gaze that genericizes desert ecologies and cultures. The work seeks fulsome desert imaginaries, inclusive of erased and marginalized histories and cultures and spatializes conditions of migration, erasure, and power through a series of exercises that engage the depth of the desert. Students work in open-ended, hybrid approaches to create deep cartographies and layered perspectival readings that reveal the interdependent cultural and climatic worlds of the Negev/Naqab.
Context
Historically, from Eurocentric and Western perspectives, deserts have conjured associations with unsafe, hostile, or extreme environments, underpinning centuries-long forces of environmental racism and misconceptions of the long-standing human inhabitation of the desert. A common colonial trope (through time and across the globe) is the use of technocratic infrastructure projects to “conquer” the desert, to “bring life” to perceived “emptiness.” Yet deserts are not empty; they are full of life, histories, traditions, and cultures. Deserts are each ecologically and culturally significant, as well as diverse, yet imperial, colonial, and Western gazes repeatedly, and strategically, posit these fulsome terrains as generic. As a result, contemporary deserts are home to unique and often contrasting spatial typologies: nomadic camps and military bases; ancient ruins and resorts; utopian communities and logistical epicenters; nuclear test sites and regionally scaled hydrological infrastructures.
Thus, in deserts, architecture plays a significant role in collective understandings of a place and its histories. In Israel/Palestine, as in all colonial contexts, the built environment is materially and culturally implicated in ongoing processes of dispossession and erasure. Here, architecture is mobilized in these processes, in the construction of new buildings (along with their associated narratives), the reimagining and culling of landscapes and ecologies, through the utilization of infrastructure and industry to define edges and cease mobility, and in the destruction and erasure of homes and villages, to establish prevailing narratives of culture, land, and history. The work of architects and scholars such as Malkit Shoshan,Footnote1 Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti,Footnote2 Eyal Weizman,Footnote3,Footnote4 Dima Srouji,Footnote5 and Nadi Abusa’ada,Footnote6 among many others, addresses many of these architectural implications, and documents and disseminates counter spatial narratives in this landscape. They do so since this land has a long history of expulsion and violence, of eradication and overwritten histories, and of longing. With many other processes of erasure throughout the long history of human inhabitation of this place, many narratives are not as well known. Millennia of exchange, connection, and human migration, beg for a deeper reading of the many entwined and very often erased histories of this complex landscape. This includes the deliberate processes of Palestinian displacement, dispossession, and erasure, the ongoing forceful regulation of the nomadic Bedouin communities of the Negev/Naqab, the slow cultural assimilation of the Nabataeans in the first century CE due to the Roman rule, as well as the modern cultural erasure and marginalization of Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews, to name a few. These erased histories and patterns of human migration and displacement include members of the Jewish diaspora and other minorities in the region, such as the Circassian community, as past and present generations of the people who now live in contemporary Israel/Palestine are intertwined with long-standing histories of persecution, violence, and genocide elsewhere.
As architects and educators grappling with our inherited disciplinary legacies, this studio course was designed to ask how architectural education might interrogate and frame spatial investigations in this complex context. What architectural tools and techniques, new or old, are adequate to this task? What do we as outsiders look to emphasize and value, and why? How can architecture make intangible dimensions of culture and entangled narratives visible? And most of all, how can we engender care and belonging in our students’ approaches and work? The land has been occupied by prophets, people, and practices for millennia, and this studio looked to explore the close overlaps of space, time, and communities that have inevitably created traces, erasures, and conditions of power and belonging.
The Negev/Naqab Desert is vast and the history of occupation and inhabitation is long-standing and highly complex. Considering its history of human migration, this desert can be understood as a threshold: an in-between place, a place of movement, migration, and growth. Current desert conditions present new spatial thresholds between the symbolic and historic, legal and illegal, natural and constructed, the human and the nonhuman. This is a landscape fraught with contested power structures and limitations within what is often perceived as a limitless desert terrain. New cities are being (and have been) built. Israeli military camps are being established alongside environmental and nuclear test facilities. Tourist routes and destinations that avoid conflicted sites and frame utopic views have been established. University campuses, advanced research facilities, and high-tech industrial zones now thrive and seek to brand the Negev/Naqab as a global hub for technology and innovation.
If the Negev/Naqab can be understood as a threshold, it must also be understood as a construct; an idea containing many concepts and identities, a multiplicity of communities, and the entwined histories of many territories, nations, and empires. As a construct, it also has become an idealized commodity to control. Like the Nabataeans centuries ago, David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, sought to “make the desert bloom,”Footnote7 an idea that underpins ongoing technocratic projects and particular social narratives that affirm Israeli inhabitation of the Negev/Naqab, while denying and destabilizing Palestinian worlds. Kibbutzim—intentional agricultural communities unique to Israel—were established as utopian socialist and Zionist-specific experiments. The presence of these communities has contributed to Israeli state-building (both physical and conceptual) in the Negev/Naqab, which continues to affirm and claim that, before such communities, the desert was empty, of Palestinians, of Bedouins, of people, life, or purpose.
The Negev/Naqab Desert itself is a palimpsest of climate and community, comprising 7,000 years of history and covering half of Israel/Palestine. Archeological ruins, wadis, settlements, and rock formations intersect with geological, climatological, and sociopolitical processes of memory and erasure. Although there is a political boundary that defines the edge of the desert, the conditions of the landscape continue beyond these formalities and bleed across vast distances. Human and nonhuman migration, climate systems, and landscape formations have all moved and evolved across the rolling desert plains for thousands of years, weaving a story that goes beyond geopolitical space. Central to this desert identity is the historic Incense RouteFootnote8 that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordanian hills and is integral to historical global networks of trade, connection, and communication.
The route was the economic basis for the development of the Nabataean cities in the Negev from 300 BCE to 400 CE and the main trade route that connected Petra—the capital of the Nabataean Empire—across the Negev/Naqab Desert to Gaza, at the Mediterranean Sea. The value and success of the Incense Route saw the Nabataean Empire flourish for seven centuries. These cities were supported by extremely sophisticated water management infrastructures consisting of dams, aqueducts, cisterns, and reservoirs for water collection as well as irrigation. The ruins of this infrastructure can be found throughout the Negev/Naqab. The remains of the Nabataean desert settlements and agricultural landscapes demonstrate the economic power of fostering a long desert supply-route from Arabia to the Mediterranean, which facilitated the development of towns, forts, and caravanserais. These traces of the past also reveal over five centuries of sophisticated Nabataean knowledge in urban planning and architecture, as well as the innovation and labor necessary to create such extensive and sustainable agricultural systems in the desert.Footnote9 The trade route established international connections and was inclusive of the nomadic people in the desert. The route became a place of social gathering while also being a migratory path. Today, it is a pale tracing of this remarkable line of exchange.
Through all its thresholds and constructs, and through the preceding 1,000 years, the Negev/Naqab Desert has been continuously inhabited by the Bedouin. Historically, the Bedouin have always been nomadic communities, traversing the far reaches of the desert, living and migrating far beyond the defined edges of what we consider the Negev/Naqab. However, these communities today live entirely different lives. Still nomadic, but severely limited in their movement and rights, most Bedouin communities are unrecognized by the Israeli government. It is estimated that 90,000 residents live in unrecognized villages and these Bedouin comprise 45 percent of the total Bedouin population in the Negev/Naqab.Footnote10
This graduate design studio engages the fullness of the Negev/Naqab Desert, its multiplicity of communities and its deep entanglements. This complexity presents an opportunity to explore the limits of architecture, together with students. Architecture itself is rarely a solution. Historically, it has done much more damage when employed as a ‘solution’Footnote11—but it can help to understand and effectively communicate social, political, historical, and spatial complexities. To do so, the studio focused on the desert and its complexity by centering the Bedouin, the ancient incense/spice route, the roles of infrastructure (both infrastructures of violence and of care), and questions of sovereignty and power structures as a means of interrogating and forging spaces of belonging. By seeking stories of migration and erasure within the Negev/Naqab, the studio sought to question the role that trade, craft, and hospitality have played (and can continue to play) in the ‘establishment’ of the desert and urged the exploration of new spatial tools to build places of belonging, comfort, empowerment, and identity. A goal of the studio was to analyze and spatialize conditions of migration, erasure, and power structures of the Negev/Naqab and to develop environmental and socio-spatial justice scenarios for action through a series of exercises that engage the desert’s depth (both visible and invisible, through space, time, and narrative). Students engaged in a series of exercises that offered different lenses, scales, and narratives to approach the landscape.
A key component of the studio was to approach everything with as much rigor—and care—as possible in establishing prompts and provocations, in collective conversations and collaborative work, and in deliberately countering and pushing back against the trope of the empty desert. Students worked through an intensive first half of the semester conducting research, mapping, and representing narratives and findings on potential areas of interest. Once sites and research agendas were established, students continued in the second half of the semester by proposing and crafting a conscious and care-full (the hyphen is deliberate!) design proposal that addressed themes such as migration, hospitality, ritual, erasure, infrastructure, or food sovereignty.
Deep Maps, Deep Models & Hybrid Drawings
Studio research was undertaken through a series of methods-based exercises (). Students grappled with the depth of the Negev/Naqab through mapping, constructing deep models, and crafting hybrid and speculative drawings. In The Agency of Mapping, contemporary landscape architect James Corner explains “the function of mapping is less to mirror reality than to engender the re-shaping of the worlds in which people live.”Footnote12 From this perspective, a map is not an object, but rather a transformative and constructive process. Through critical mapping, students were asked to reveal depth from above. As we know, maps are symbolic representations of selected characteristics of a place, and usually drawn on a flat surface.Footnote13 They tell stories, and those stories codify some narratives while selectively erasing others. Maps are very often tools and instruments of growth: they locate resources, political borders, physical features, climate zones, and aerial conditions; they synthesize Global Positioning System information and spatialize urban networks. Mappings of care, however, require one to plunge into unfamiliar contexts through new lenses and to engage with new participants. Historically, maps, or plans, were colonial projects, and were leveraged in the imperial and colonial interests of state and nonstate actors to craft and frame very particular narratives, histories, and rationales. A goal of this studio work was, through mapping, to re-frame the desert and work to reveal lost or excised narratives and conditions of erasure.
Figure 1. Cataloging Nationalism, Community, and Mobility through Hydrological Typologies in the Negev/Naqab. Credit: Wilson Jiang, Carleton M.Arch Student.
Figure 2. Cataloging Socio-spatial Artifacts at the Intersection of Hydrological and Touristic Infrastructures in the Negev/Naqab. Credit: Wilson Jiang, Carleton M.Arch Student.
Figure 3. Mapping and Reframing Necro-politics in Israel/Palestine through Contemporary and Historical Sites of Human Burial. Credit: Evan Kettler, Carleton M.Arch Student.
Figure 4. Comparative Planimetric Analyses of Spatial Conditions at select Jewish and Bedouin Burial Sites. Credit: Evan Kettler, Carleton M.Arch Student
Figure 5. Comparative Axonometric and Sectional Analyses of Ancient Jewish, Contemporary Jewish, Traditional Bedouin, Contemporary Bedouin, and Awliyaa Bedouin Burial Practices. Credit: Ean Kettler, Carleton M.Arch Student.
Figure 6. Aerial Israel/Palestine: Mapping and Reframing Bird Migration and Habitats, Flight Paths and Restrictions, Nature Reserves, Satellite Orbits, Airbases and Nuclear Facilities, Airports and Airfields, and Erased Palestinian Settlements. Credit: Harrison Lane, Carleton M.Arch Student.
Figure 7. Aerial Jerusalem: Mapping and Reframing Flight Paths, Airspace Restrictions, and Settlement Patterns. Credit: Harrison Lane, Carleton M.Arch Student.
Figure 8. Mapping and Reframing Bird Migration Patterns and Satellite Paths over Asia Minor, the Middle East, and North Africa. Credit: Harrison Lane, Carleton M.Arch Student
Figure 9. Comparative Axonometric Drawings: Airspace Restrictions and Occupations over Jerusalem. Credit: Harrison Lane, Carleton M.Arch Student
Figure 10. Comparative Axonometric Drawings: Airspace Restrictions and Occupations over the Negev/Naqab. Credit: Harrison Lane, Carleton M.Arch Student
Figure 11. Comparative Catalog of all Airbases, Airports, Airfields, Nuclear Missile Sites, and Bird Populations in Israel/Palestine. Credit: Harrison Lane, Carleton M.Arch Student
Figure 12. Mapping and Reframing Hegemonic Power and Invisible Divisions in Israel/Palestine through Access, Connection, and Disconnection in Infrastructure.
Credit: Cathryn Tran, Carleton M.Arch Student
Figure 13. Mapping and Reframing Access and Division in the Siyag Region for Recognized and Unrecognized Bedouin Settlements. Credit: Cathryn Tran, Carleton M.Arch Student.
Figure 14. Comparative Planimetric and Sectional Analyses of Infrastructures of Surveillance and Control in the Negev/Naqab Desert. Credit: Cathryn Tran, Carleton M.Arch Student
How can we map (and un-map) through and with empathy and care? To immerse oneself in the “field” is more than just to observe on-site or to identify with a particular theoretical viewpoint. To be in the field is an active role: it involves emotion, understanding, instincts, and feeling. This immersion engages all the senses, it engages history and time, it seeks to establish a voice, and most importantly, it demands consideration and empathy from various perspectives. In many ways it is a means of unsettling preconceived notions of site, people, place, program, and design; allowing for what exists to be observed, carefully and consciously. The desert is a complex landscape, filled with histories, ecologies, cultures, people, tensions, and power. Mapping the region is one challenge, but actively unfolding and reading the land, while identifying new threads and connections between territories and its inhabitants, is an active pursuit of investigation. Students map contemporary and historical thresholds (including their narratives) of the Negev/Naqab to identify and spatialize tangible and intangible dimensions of this desert—done to better understand the region and its conditions. Mapping is a means to immerse oneself in this site and build a critical thesis around research and knowledge of the physical and fictional spaces of the desert and their consequences. The mapping assignment immediately introduced students to the Negev/Naqab and established/problematized individual research trajectories for the term’s work. Student mapping worked at numerous scales (defying the often uniscalar nature of the conventional map): at the scales of the region, the community, and the body to learn from the landscape.
Since the eighteenth century, architects have tended to imagine buildings in isolation from material, cultural, and ecological processes and perhaps this tendency began, in an analogous way, with the emptiness of the drawing board.Footnote14 Today, architects continue to suffer from this same legacy through the emptiness of the computer screen. To counter the continued perception of emptiness, the desert must be reimagined, and therefore redrawn, as a world of complex ecological and sociopolitical processes of erasure and memory, by embracing myriad and multivalent spatial conditions and practices.Footnote15 Subsequently, students were next asked to reveal the depths of the Negev/Naqab from within. Drawing inspiration from Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Diorama series, Joseph Cornell’s Shadow Boxes, and the Renaissance tradition of perspective machines, students built deep models, associated photographs, and composed hybrid drawings to actively engage in the Negev/Naqab Desert as a place of multiple and highly interdependent cultural, political, and climatic worlds. Through a hybrid approach to making, students took inspiration from landscape architect and UC Berkeley Professor Danika Cooper’s work to visualize the desert through multiple images, media, and temporalities such that they interact on the drawing plane to reveal a multiplicity of spatial narratives and create more pluralistic desert imaginaries.Footnote16 Drawing from the mapping research, students developed recombinant assemblies of overlapping drawings and photographs to create hybrid perspectival readings of the Negev/Naqab landscape. These were assembled with specific layers related to the peoples, climates, and territories of this desert and to confound data related to cultural, political, and climatic processes in an interdependent and iterative fashion. This work contributed to further framing a critical thesis in the term’s design project and to identifying suitable sites of intervention. By engaging in an open-ended, hybrid way of drawing, students confront the fullness of the Negev/Naqab Desert and critically challenge staid architectural notions of site and program. This hybrid drawing process acknowledges the dynamism and fullness of the desert in an open-ended inquiry that makes space for new desert imaginaries that contend with the hybrid processes that shape the cultures, climates, and territories of this place through space and time. The desert is not empty, static or univocal. Our ways (and drawings) to understanding them should not be either.
Through architectural methods, students could work toward a renewed understanding of the fullness of the Negev/Naqab Desert, its multiplicity of communities, its thresholds and constructs, its temporalities and climates, and its processes of memory and erasure. Further, as anthropogenic climate change forces a reckoning with settler growth-based economic paradigms, Indigenous dispossession, and environmental process alteration, students sought novel desert imaginaries that revive erased narratives, amplify marginalized cultures, and synthesize fulsome perceptions that reconcile the desert’s past with its many possible futures.
In all its complexity, the studio demanded vulnerability, responsibility, and empathy as a core method. Although the outputs of the studio helped the students to recognize the multiplicity of narratives in addition to working physically through real and metaphorical depths, the primary method of teaching in the studio is through exposure and relentless discussion. It is an unjust privilege to look at these landscapes as outsiders, to map spaces that as a community we do not know, nor experience the consequences of. However, we also believe shying away from these landscapes does no justice to what architectural education should, and indeed, must be doing. So we continually asked our students to question what part of themselves they are giving over to the work, and we encouraged them to be nimble about what their ideas of space, use, and experience are. We ask: What are you willing to do to make yourself vulnerable in this work? What are you willing to do to abandon your original thoughts or understandings? What are you willing to learn, and unlearn? In what ways can we sit with site, not just work through it or extract from it? And most importantly, how do you serve the work, and who does the work serve? We hope that the privilege of studying this landscape allows learning as a practice (perhaps even the practice) of amplifying the narratives of others. By countering the conventional methods of an architecture studio that seeks to resolve a program or problem, we hope our students (and ourselves) continue to sit in a space of challenge and discomfort, and to question what is or is not protected in the contemporary world. Indeed, to do any less would be glib surface reading of the desert’s depths.
While emphasizing that the work and research should be shaped by testimonies, interviews, and narratives (not just data and research papers) as these are critical to making space for marginalized voices to speak through the mappings and models, we asked students to constantly keep in check their privilege and lack of knowing. Perhaps one of the most critical practices in the studio was defining the difference between safety and comfort in the studio space and in the learning. The studio had to be a safe space for open discussion, but the learning needed to be uncomfortable. In many ways, the goal of the studio was for students to sit in discomfort for as much and as long as possible, to ruminate over the issues at hand, to acknowledge the darkness that is inherent in the work. We wished the students to exist in a safe space of learning, to feel that they could ask questions, that they were allowed to not know, to be okay with being corrected when making false or assumed statements. But with this safety we wished them to be personally in the discomfort, and to feel in themselves a concern, a complexity, an overwhelming feeling of being lost, and a desire to engage. We believe to grapple with this unlearning and to sit in this darkness, by contrast, is what allows the lightness to come through in their work and in their positions in the field as architects.
As architectural educators, we are tasked with empowering our students to build a better world. Architecture is dually engaged with humanistic pursuits alongside pragmatic concerns and architectural education confronts the complexities of this duality head-on. As a result, boundaries between academia and practice are much more fluid in architecture than is typical in other academic disciplines. In architecture, approaches to teaching and learning can translate directly to approaches to practice. Critical architectural practice, like all other forms of critical inquiry, requires the continuous reexamination of standards to reconcile what our built environment is with what it should be. Thus, critical architectural practice is a visionary enterprise and is defined by an optimistic approach. To make this optimism meaningful, we sought to support and appreciate our students’ cognitive and emotional responses to complex and difficult material. This epistemic empathy is a model of teaching that foregrounds discursive discussion in the design studio and engenders both criticality and optimism in the work. And in our broken world, we need criticality and optimism in our built environment more than ever.
Acknowledgment
We wish to express our sincere gratitude to the great cohort of students who took on this studio and contributed to the course’s pedagogy with such grace, care, and curiosity. The work produced was incredibly thoughtful and asked important questions. Thank you, Danielle Berno, Kimberly Casemore, Sara Cipolla, Derek Clouatre, Sara Farokhi Boroujeni, Wilson Jiang, Evan Kettler, Harrison Lane, Mark Meneguzzi, Ramon Renderos Soto, Ben Stern, and Cathryn Tran.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Piper Bernbaum
Piper Bernbaum is an assistant professor at the Carleton University Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism in Ottawa. She is the recipient of the Prix de Rome for Emerging Practitioners, and the Governor Generals Academic Gold Medal for her work. Bernbaum’s research is focused on the intersection of law and architecture, the considerations and constraints of social and spatial plurality, and the appropriation of space through design. Especially interested in legal-fictions and everyday architectures, Bernbaum’s work looks at community building and the loopholes found in both inclusive and exclusive environments.
Zach Colbert
Zach Colbert is an award-winning architect and licensed practitioner in Ontario, New York, and Arizona. He is an associate professor and associate director of graduate programs at the Carleton University Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism in Ottawa. He has previously been on faculty at Columbia University and Parsons in New York City. His work primarily focuses on climate futures in the built environment by exploring the reciprocities between common fundamental elements of urban spatial logics and environmental process alteration such as energy, capital, and water.
Notes
1 Malkit Shoshan, Atlas of Conflict (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010).
2 Sandi Hilal and Allesandro Petti, Permanent Temporariness (Stockholm: Royal Institute of Art/Art and Theory Publishing, 2018).
3 Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline (Gottingen: Steidl, 2005).
4 Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).
5 Dima Srouji, “Vignettes of Subterranean Palestine,” Avery Review 56 (April 2022).
6 Nadi Abusa’ada, “The Reconstruction of Palestine: Geographical Imaginaries After World War I,” in The Social and Cultural History of Palestine: Essays in Honour of Salim Tamari (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
7 “The Ben-Gurion Desert Home,” צריף בן גוריון, accessed May 1, 2023, https://ben-gurion.co.il/en/about/.
8 The Incense Route—now a UNESCO World Heritage Site—was a network of trade routes extending over 2,000 kilometers that facilitated the transportation of frankincense and myrrh from Yemen and Oman to the Mediterranean. Frankincense and myrrh, highly prized in antiquity for both aromatic and healing properties, could only be obtained from trees grown in southern Arabia, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Arab merchants brought these goods to Roman markets by camel caravans that followed the Incense Route. See https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/map. See also Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, “Trade Between Arabia and the Empires of Rome and Asia | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History,” The Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, accessed September 23, 2022, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/ince/hd_ince.htm.
9 Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art, “Trade Between Arabia.”
10 According to The Association of Forty (http://www.assoc40.org/en/).
11 Rob Holmes, “The Problem with Solutions,” Places Journal, July 14, 2020, https://doi.org/10.22269/200714.
12 James Corner, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention (New York City: Wiley, 2011).
13 “Map | National Geographic Society,” accessed December 6, 2022, https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/map.
14 Brian McGrath and Jean Gardner, Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today (London: Wiley, 2007).
15 Danika Cooper, “Drawing Deserts, Making Worlds,” in Deserts Are Not Empty, ed. Samia Henni (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022).
16 Cooper, “Drawing Deserts.”