Countryside as a city:
Desert as an Oasis

Instructor: Alex Yuen
Location: Las Cruces, New Mexico 
Term: Spring 2021


This thesis proposes a new vision for the desert, one that takes its landscape at face value and establishes a series of ways to live beyond the strictures of the desert. This thesis advances a reunification between lifestyle and land for the next century in the American Southwest employing a new ecology, economy,   and environment to the existing system. The American landscape is being sacrificed to contemporary modes of domesticity. By treating the Land Ordinance of 1785 as the deep structure   of the region — and the west as a whole — this thesis presents a series of   typologies — like a bio-diverse community — that work mutualistically to union  place, landscape, architecture, and neighbor. Within this variation of typology, a complex series of lifestyles can coexist, treating the newly-formed metropolis as an object of unification between habitat and habitation. This creates the necessary question of how a heterotopic vision of the second half of the twentyfirst   century be conceived in a place that’s often incorrectly perceived as a romanticized blank canvas, a non-place, a to-be-developed tabula rasa. The current desert city neglects its climate and regionalism, shielding itself from the heat and dryness rather than embracing its natural condition. Treating   the desert as an opportunity rather than a constraint, a new series multi-scalar types will emerge that uses the arid climate as an opportunistic resource to create a system and a process that perceives the countryside as a city, the desert as an oasis.