endless

Current influences: America – A Horse With No Name, The Sea Ranch Architecture, Environment, and Idealism at SFMOMA, the window seat of a 737, ensamble studio, Yucca Crater by Ball-Nogues Studio

Mirages are a part of living in the desert. False euphoria from the heat and sun that bakes the place. 

Oasis are part of living in the desert. Splashes of salvation that only make the mirages more cruel by giving them credence.

Dreams are part of living in the desert. The vast emptiness lets the mind test its own limits of fantasy.

Salvation Mountain, Arcosanti and Biosphere 2 all sit between oasis, mirage and dream. They plop onto the horizon ready to be seen but also ready to dissolve back into the minds of their creators.

The desert backdrop allows these visions to balance between wild and controlled. All three act as works of tedious aggregation like the sand that makes up the surrounding desert. The filigree of Biosphere’s structure and tiled panels tie together dissonant shapes and uses into a single place of magic. Sand itself is used to cast parts of Arcosanti, in the never to reached final form it would be a megastructure composed of repeated forms. Salvation Mountain forms from aggregation of endless sand, straw, paint and refuse painstakingly added together. Aggregation and assembly of parts in an endless landscape of unquantifiable sand changing.

The spaces that spring forth are complex yet simple. Pieces of a puzzle that come together in ways that leave space for varied activity and life. The sun that makes this place hostile also makes places of shade special. The “forest” space at Salvation Mountain and the literal rain forest in Biosphere show the power of a canopy overhead while Arcosanti’s tunnels from the greenhouse at the bottom of the hill to above control harvest its heat during the winter. These special ships create not just new places to live but new ways to live. Arcosanti’s collective living, Salvation Mountain’s expression of art through frugality of material and the self reliant Biosphere’s self-contained world.

This is the dream of the desert. To claim the endless horizon in place. To build a mirage. To spring forth an oasis. I want next.