The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
A new venue, named ‘Sphere’ (no ‘the’), opened last month on the Las Vegas Strip, blasting spherical video projections into the skies above the Nevada desert – most uncanny of all is the blinking human eyeball which rolls around surveilling the city without so much as a socket. In 2021, the AR sent Mimi Zeiger to Vegas, to search ‘fervently for some kind of authenticity, some kind of fun’ in the city’s endless casino halls and sideshows, finding instead only the scents of ‘weed, vomit and tropical air freshener’ in the back seats of Ubers. Perhaps a city like Vegas could only exist in the desert, far from anything, ‘an oasis of possibility’; but, in denying that landscape’s reality – with its emerald golf courses, ‘bunker-like interiors’ and endless air conditioning – such a place is left open to ‘darker forces’, Zeiger writes.
In the reading list below, more of what only the world’s deserts can hold is examined, drawing from the magazine’s archive to showcase the ingenuity of populations and architects in resource-constrained environments, the improbable excesses of golf in the Bahraini desert (like ‘Scotland, without the weather’), and the search for answers to our greatest mysteries at the ancient monuments and high-altitude observatories that call the desert home.
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What happens in Vegas: escaping to the desert, AR May 2021, Mimi Zeiger
‘The continual push for territory, for novelty, that non-stop expansionism built on extractive practices and fuelled by American exceptionalism, leads headlong into the desert’
Another planet: sports hall at the ALMA observatory, Chile, AR October 2023, Alejandro Celedón
‘The desert makes epochs visible in the different soils, sedimentary differences and subtle colour changes’
From camp to city: ‘Permanent is not the opposite of temporary’, AR May 2017, Manuel Herz
‘The Sahrawi camps are spaces in which inhabitants are in charge of their own lives – at least to the extent possible with the continuing occupation of their home country’
World of watercraft: the future of dryland ecosystems, AR June 2017, Hadley Arnold
‘We need to build a design profession fluent in critical reasoning around water’s relationship to social, political and economic power’
Oil in one: sand greens and grass greens in Bahrain, AR October 2022, Ali Karimi
‘The putting green is technically a putting brown, made up of fine sand mixed with 11 parts diesel and one part motor oil – the mixture keeps the sand in place and provides a smooth putting surface, emulating closely cropped grass’
Reassessment: the Pyramids of Giza, AR August 1949, JM Richards
‘It stands guard over centuries of time, and the trivialities round its base take up their proper role, as the froth and flotsam thrown up by a passing tide’
Monument to Egyptology: the new Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, AR May 2023, Mohamed Elshahed
‘Many Egypt departments in western museums have never employed a full‑time Egyptian Egyptologist’
