Bernbaum, P., & Colbert, Z. (2023). Desert Depths: Multivalent Architectural Narratives of Belonging in the Negev/Naqab Desert. Journal of Architectural Education, 77(2), 390–409.

https://doi.org/10.1080/10464883.2023.2233387

Excerpt:

“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’—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.”

Student work by Carleton Architecture Students Wilson Jiang, Evan Kettler, Harrison Lane, and Cathryn Tran