A New Miracle in the Desert

Mark Campbell and Stewart Dodd

The Salton Sea in the Californian desert is the result of an environmental accident that occurred during the early 1900s. This 'accidental sea' soon became a tourist attraction and an opportunity for rampant architectural speculation. Resorts, marinas and suburbs grew up almost overnight and at its height in the 1950s members of the cultural elite – from Jack and Jackie Kennedy to Frank Sinatra and his booze-addled Rat Pack – visited to drink martinis and race speedboats. Unfortunately the 'sea' was solely fed by chemically enriched agricultural run-off and the promise of modern architectural haven – 'a Palm Springs with water' – faded with the toxic reality of 140º summers and apocalyptic fish die-offs.

This year Intermediate 1 will continue to examine the architectural extremities and cultural oddities that we uncover through our research. We will explore the notion of 'accidental architectures' and investigate the outsider communities who continue to live among the residues – in defiance of any discernible logic. Throughout these investigations we will act as 'archaeologists of the immediate future' and our forensic examinations will include found artefacts, architectural precedents, images of both the past and future, and speculative and spurious research.

'America' – Jean Baudrillard once noted – 'is the original version of modernity. We are the dubbed or subtitled version.' Taking this statement as a provocation, we will begin by exploring the questions of 'faked histories', architectural promise and cultural appropriation through such works as Gordon Matta-Clark's 'Fake Estates' and the filmic explorations of America in La Jetée (1962), Alphaville (1965) and Zabriskie Point (1970). Fieldwork is vital to the unit and this year we will visit the abandoned suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, the airplane graveyards of Tucson, the desert suburb of Palm Springs and the Californian Riviera of Salton Sea. In response to this research and architectural precedents such as Archigram's Instant Cities and Ant Farm's Inflatables series, the unit will be asked to design a new miracle in the desert – a temporary resort, or an airborne floating city – which is playful and disconsolate, a sly ruse, a deliberate falsity and a critique of our architectural intransigence.

Unit Staff

Mark Campbell has taught history and design at the AA since 2004. He has taught previously at the Cooper Union, Princeton University and Auckland University and received post-graduate degrees as a Fulbright Scholar from Princeton University (MA, PhD) and undergraduate degrees from Auckland University (BA, Arch Hons). He has worked in practice in Auckland, New York and London and served as the Managing Editor of Grey Room and the Cooper Union Archive, in addition to publishing extensively. He is the Director of the Paradise Lost AA Research Cluster.

Stewart Dodd is founding director of Satellite Architects Limited. He studied architecture at the Bartlett and worked for several architects in the UK and Europe. He has taught extensively at schools including the AA, the Bartlett and Brighton University, as well as being a visiting critic at a number of schools worldwide. He presently sits on the RIBA Validation board and is an external examiner at the Bartlett and Brighton University. Satellite has been the recipient of numerous architectural awards, most recently, the Green Apple, Gold Award for Sustainable Architecture.