An Armchair Tour of Utopia

The American desert offers some of the most distinctive geography in the world: parched brown brush, red-clay mountains, cityscapes of saguaro cacti, and even the occasional but vast swath of actual sand. As this region—comprising Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and parts of California and Texas—expands in population, it has presented similarly distinctive planning problems, namely those to do with immigration and irrigation. Even the climate lends itself to novelty, resulting in an architecture that’s at once indigenous and artificial, that mixes xeriscaping with non-native palm trees, adobe and stucco with pools, and golf courses. This “empty” region, a formerly barren landscape, has filled out, becoming one of the fastest growing in the country, beckoning New Agers and outcasts with a utopian call to enact their visions and passions.

Desert America: Territory of Paradox visits this, well, paradoxical territory, through compelling photos and straightforward reportage. Divided into seven “books” with titles such as “The Elements” and “Other Worlds,” Desert America most closely resembles the popular Earth from Above book of a few years back.

It’s all here: from Biosphere and Las Vegas (two artificial worlds) to Little Boy and Burning Man (one destructive reckoning, the other creative tempest). Las Vegas “celebrat[es] its success with blinding enthusiasm and extravagant hyperbole,” reads one portion of the book. “Visitors ... experience firsthand the astonishing transformation of their wildest dreams into reality, freely partaking of pleasures forbidden elsewhere.” The book returns to this theme, a nicely unifying thread, again and again.

Of course, plain old Mother Nature makes several appearances too; how could she not? Seven dramatic, two-page spreads end the book in a chapter titled “Isolation.” But images of the Salt Flats, Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and Death Valley, while beautiful, aren’t so surprising. Nor do instances of man harnessing nature—the Hoover Dam, the Colorado River—tell the real story of the American desert.

The region’s essence lies instead with its dreamers—those Vegas gamblers, but also the Mormons and the rocket men, the artists and the real estate developers, the astronomers and the militarists. All come seeking to conquer the desert and, by extension, to control their greater environment. That’s true of high-minded experiments such as Biosphere 2 and Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, a commune that blends architecture and ecology as its modus operandi. And it’s true of more organic temporary cities such as Nevada’s Burning Man—a ten-year-old celebration of personal freedom and soaring imagination that’s part Fringe Fest, part Woodstock—and Arizona’s Quartzsite—a conglomerate of more than 70 trailer parks that attracts perhaps as many as 2 million tourists in RVs each winter to hunt for, trade, and discuss ad nauseam the desert’s wealth of gemstones and minerals.

The book takes us inside research facilities for robotics and space exploration, missile and airplane graveyards, observatories and windmills, pristinely developed retirement oases and ever-expanding metropolises—an armchair tour of a weird and complex culture. Like its subject, Desert America is wide-ranging and beautiful, bizarre and awesome, touched with the heat and always, always fascinating.