Deserts Are Not Empty Book Launch

Join us to mark the release of Deserts Are Not Empty, edited by Samia Henni, the latest publication from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC). As the title insists, deserts are not empty. And yet, despite the undeniable presence of human and nonhuman lives and forces in desert territories, the “regime of emptiness” has inhabited, and is still inhabiting, many imaginaries. Deserts Are Not Empty brings together a variety of voices, disciplines, formats, genres, and forms of visualization to unsettle and unlearn the desert, opening up possibilities to see, think, imagine it otherwise.

Join the webinar on Zoom.

While the book emerged from the 2020 Preston Thomas Memorial Lectures at the Department of Architecture, Cornell, this conversation aims to open the book back up within an educational context. Samia will be joined by GSAPP Professors Reinhold Martin and Felicity Scott, along with CBAC Director Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, CBAC Assistant Director Joanna Joseph, and graphic designer Laura Coombs, to discuss not only the ongoing colonial and imperial powers that have often portrayed arid lands as “empty” spaces ready to be occupied, exploited, extracted, and polluted but also what needs to be unlearned and unsettled in the desert in the design curricula at GSAPP.

Organized by Columbia GSAPP. Free and open to the public. GSAPP is committed to providing universal access to all of our virtual events. Please contact events@arch.columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.