In its October issue, The Architectural Review finds the world’s deserts to be anything but empty
Deserts comprise one third of the Earth’s land area. Despite their prevalence, they are often marginalised, seen as empty and expendable spaces that are inhospitable to life. This view erases the complex ecosystems that thrive in desert environments, and the Indigenous communities that have made them their home for millennia.
It is also a view that justifies countless atrocities: the desert has been the site of experimental nuclear tests in Australia, become a colonial frontier in Israel and been weaponised to control borders in the US. Historical violence is repeated, replicated and projected into the future: planned desert cities such as Neom and Telosa continue to ‘promote the reconfiguration of deserts as undiscovered “frontiers”’, writes Gökçe Günel.
Some architects are resisting the notion that deserts are empty. The design of a health centre in Newman, Australia, is the result of extensive consultations with its Aboriginal users. In Morocco, Aziza Chaouni seeks to preserve the desert’s musical and agricultural heritage, while in Ḥaḍramūt, the reconstruction work carried out by Salma Samar Damluji is carefully attuned to the building methods of Yemen’s master builders. ‘It is architecture that considers ecology, agriculture, water sources and biodiversity in its design,’ Damluji says.
A deep understanding of desert environments could provide models for building not only in deserts, but on an increasingly resource-scarce planet. ‘The desert lays bare everything,’ Brahim El Guabli writes in the keynote, ‘but it also summons the multiple forms of generosity that adhere to an ethics of survival and to notions of ecological care.’
Lead images: From Russia to the Antarctic and from China to the US, desert flora, fauna, buildings and infrastructure have long featured on the postage stamps of national and colonial authorities. An Algerian stamp shows the Saharan Museum in Ouargla, while the Soviet Union issued stamps warning against desertification in 1989. Niger elegised the tree of Ténéré, an important navigational mark in the Sahara, in 1974 – it had been knocked down by a truck the year before
