Desert by Design: Creative Minds, Arid Places, Tailor-Made Spaces

Desert by Design features the interior spaces in Earth’s arid climes and, just as importantly, the creative minds who inhabit them

It is a love letter to these dreamers and doers, the many kinds of people who reside in these places around the world with the same basic thing in common—lack of rainfall—but, as it turns out, share much more. Deserts are not known to be the easiest, most comfortable places to settle. And so, there is something about those who choose to live there, who are inspired by a challenge, who constantly create and innovate. This book explores exactly what that “something” means.

Texas desert dwellers Molly Mandell and James Burke set off on a quest to identify more than thirty incredible spaces and get to know the people who created them. By area, deserts make up a third of Earth’s landmass, so Mandell and Burke had a lot of ground to cover, making their way through the southwestern United States, down to Mexico and Argentina, and across the pond to Egypt, Morocco, Spain, and Jordan. They ventured to India and to a micro-desert in New Zealand. They visited high desert and low desert, urban desert and rural desert, sandy desert and scrubby desert. They photographed everything from iconic desert spaces, like those inhabited by Yves Saint Laurent, César Manrique, and Donald Judd, to new, groundbreaking structures, all the while interviewing the choreographers, hoteliers, sculptors, environmentalists, chefs, audio engineers, preservationists, and more who have created these notable places.