DESERT LIVING
Throughout history, the desert has been used as a symbol for a number of occurrences and events.
In the Bible, it was often described as a place of solitude, with the potential for people to speak directly with God. In art, it has often been portrayed as a vast sea of sand, a place to lose oneself in, and where the border between life and death is blurred.
In literature the desert is often described as equally beautiful and dangerous, its intense sunshine without compassion for human needs for water and shade.
The desert has also been portrayed as a place of hiding from the world, a place where no one would think of to look.
To build a house in the desert is in a way to remove oneself from the rest of the world. By retreating into the desert, one is also entering a different universe; a place of silence and introspection.
In the desert, the only sound that is constant is that of the breeze gently moving through the sand dunes.
Desert life – in the shape of lizards, snakes and scorpions – takes place in the cracks and creaks of the rocks, dormant during the hot days and only in motion thanks to the coolness of the desert night.
Houses in the desert come in all shapes and sizes.
Andrea Zittel’s art project in Joshua Tree, AZ–West, is perhaps one of the most famous of contemporary desert themed installations. Here she tests how, “spaces, objects and acts of living all intertwine into a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today”.
The way she has done this is by, for more than 20 years, building a small home in the desert. In other parts of the world, the Bedouin tent is still today the most common house structure, its textile walls making them easy to transport from one place to another, as the Bedouins make their way across the desert landscape.
Since the mid twentieth century, the modernist type of building with its sharp angles, large windows and open space between indoor and outdoor has become a regular fixture in many deserts.
They turn the desert itself into a backdrop, something to enjoy from a distance while enjoying the amenities of modern life. In a way, the desert becomes a detached but still moving image.
These kinds of houses make it possible to remain even longer in the desert, to sustain life and prolong the period of calm and rest that the solitude brings. Often, they come with a pool, appearing as a mirage in an otherwise dry desert.
The desert has many faces. Like all landscapes, it is a continuous state of motion, never exactly the same from one day to the next. But the changes are subtle and rarely noticeable to the untrained human eye.
What is instantly noticeable to every visitor, however, is the purity of air, paired with the relentless heat provided by the bright desert sun.
