Science fiction authors have provided many visions of dystopian futures in the Southwest. Can architects help avert such disastrous outcomes?
In the dark comedy series The Curse, the main characters, played by Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone, try desperately to brand and sell the idea of “passive living.” Set in Española, New Mexico, the HGTV-aspirant couple has built an ultramodern passive house—a superinsulated, airtight construction that eliminates the need for energy-intensive air conditioning, complete with a mirrored exterior of solar panels. It sticks out like a sore thumb in its working-class Northern New Mexico neighborhood. The couple, cursed by good intentions but intractable character flaws, struggles for buy-in from the community and buyers for their sustainable homes.
While the spot-on satire skewers the gentrifiers, The Curse raises questions about what architecture could look like in the Southwest, a region facing a hotter, more arid future. Passive design principles have been used in traditional architecture throughout history, and certified low-energy-use Passive Houses were defined in the late 1980s (the first certified Passive House in New Mexico was built in 2011). But despite the impending warming of the climate, uncompromisingly eco-friendly design and construction are still the exceptions rather than the rule. The rest of us are still cranking the air conditioner.
We know the future of architecture should be sustainable, ecological, energy-efficient, less fossil-fuel-dependent, and provide shelter in a climate-changed future. But our current slowness to adopt meaningful change, socially and at the policy level, has resulted in a landscape of “green inequity.” The way it’s currently going, the rich will drive their electric cars and live in their smart homes, and the poor will continue to commute on congested highways and live in poorly ventilated, cheap houses. Until it all collapses.
What happens when the grid fails? What happens when temperatures rise to deadly levels?
What happens when the grid fails? What happens when temperatures rise to deadly levels? When fire and extreme weather events destroy cities? When large populations become climate refugees?
Science fiction authors have provided many visions of such dystopian futures. Can architects help avert such disastrous outcomes? I spoke with a few artists, architects, and researchers about what such futures could hold, and what our expectations should be.
In the apocalyptic world of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the main characters escape the chaos and drought of Southern California, migrating north and watching out for thieves, wild dogs, and armor-plated “house trucks” equipped with fully automated weapons. They establish a colony named Acorn, fortified by a ring of cacti, and a new religion, Earthseed, that calls for people to “take root among the stars.”
The arid Southwest has a long history of architectural innovations and utopian ideals. Architects and idealists have come here to experiment in building and alternative ways of living.
Off-grid, anti-establishment communities all over the region model a future of energy independence—each with their own character: the new age Earthship Community near Taos, New Mexico; the anarchists of Slab City, California; and even MAGA isolationists of the San Luis Valley of Colorado. Annual gatherings of ephemeral built communities like Burning Man in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada and assemblies of vandwellers like the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous in Arizona show possibilities of nomadic lifestyles that many might have to adopt in the wake of climate catastrophe rendering vast areas uninhabitable for months of the year.
In Texas, avant-garde architects and countercultural pranksters Ant Farm (founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michels) introduced the term “nomadic architecture,” positing it in opposition to the rampant consumerism of postwar U.S. culture and the staid edifices of Brutalist architecture that were proliferating at the time. They proposed instead: movable, playful, inflatable architecture.
Architect and educator Sarah Aziz, whose research subjects include the proliferation of Dollar General stores and the potential building uses of tumbleweeds, points out that much of the radical architecture espoused in the 1960s and ’70s was “attributed to extractive practices”—like oil drilling in the Southwest. A Space Age reliant on fossil fuels, petrochemicals, and plastics.
Yet today, and into the future, nomadic architecture remains a site of resistance. We see it in the pro-Palestinian encampments at universities demanding decolonization and divestment from the profit-driven military industrial complex, but also in the enduring tent cities of houseless communities in places experiencing skyrocketing rents. These kinds of ad hoc, informal settlements could become potent forms of refusal, but they are also indicative of entrenched deprivation.
In a coming age of weather extremes, mobility in architecture may become a more vital concern. Could these structures become dwellings of the future?
Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate fiction novel The Ministry for the Future begins with a deadly heat wave event and power outage that kills 20 million people. This strikingly optimistic novel goes on to explore possible scenarios of a positive climate future: a complementary carbon currency resurrects the economy and fights carbon emissions; rural towns migrate to cities, taking cash buyouts to open up wildlife corridors; the oil industry is redirected to pump Arctic sea water. Everyone works together to keep global temperature rise down.
In the world that modernity has built, humans rapidly developed a taste for constant comfort. Changing this habit is an imperative of the near future. A full-AC-blasting, lush-golf-course, hourly-Amazon-delivery life is just not tenable. “To survive in the future will mean reducing our appetites for luxury that contemporary life satisfies today,” says Jack Murphy, executive editor of the Architect’s Newspaper. “One of the questions I’m interested in is: how can we adjust our expectations of what architecture can do for us?”
One of the questions I’m interested in is: how can we adjust our expectations of what architecture can do for us?
Architect and educator Chris Taylor warns against the tendency to look solely to new technologies, the “next shiny thing,” to save us. Massive undertakings of bio-engineering, carbon capture, desalination plants, 3D-printed structures, and the like, derive from primarily economic propositions. “What we need is something much more seismic,” he says, deriving from within humanity itself.
But slowing down and scaling back—whether in comfort or capital returns—is a rather foreign concept in the United States. Intentional measures of degrowth, of community-forward rather than capital-based responses, will require a complete reshuffling of priorities.
Principal at MASS Design Group Joseph Kunkel (Northern Cheyenne) believes that architects and designers bring criticality and professional know-how to the table, “but we have to balance that with local knowledge and local nuance.” He advocates for a deeply engaged, collaborative approach to architecture that considers labor, locality, and Indigenous and traditional practices in close consultation with the community—with the caveat that this method is time-consuming and costly. “Not all projects allow for that type of cost, but every project should be afforded it,” he says. “When we think about those [communities] that are most at risk, whether it’s climate change or housing insecurity, [they] need this type of thinking.”
In the dystopian future constructed by Paolo Bacigalupi in his novel The Water Knife, the privileged classes live in massive, self-sustaining, enclosed “arcologies,” named after the concept by Paolo Soleri, while the poor have to make do in the slums (read: suburbs) outside, plagued by dust storms, drought, and deprivation.
Some might still pin their hopes on megastructures to transform urban living and house dense populations with minimal carbon footprints and optimized land use. In Saudi Arabia, a sustainable architectural wonder called The Line, currently under construction, aspires to house up to 9 million people in a carless, vertical, modular planned city, configured in a straight line that cuts through the desert. Like the house in The Curse, it will also sport a mirrored exterior, rising like a mirage in the desert.
Imagine these utopian megastructures supplanting the Las Vegas Strip and taking over the Phoenix skyline. Self-contained bubbles that provide for their residents’ every need. Why worry about climate change if you’re ensconced in a climate-controlled environment, enjoying your hydroponically grown vegetables and your indoor waterfall?
When asked if such futuristic visions of architecture and urban planning would solve our collective issues, Murphy is skeptical. “When I feel hopeful for architectures of the future,” he says, he looks to “much simpler and more low-technology solutions.”
This includes buildings that last longer and have a lower carbon footprint. Shiny new buildings sprouting from the middle of the desert, no matter how high-tech and energy-efficient, are costly—in both dollars and carbon. And modern architecture’s utopian promises—particularly in projects for mass housing—have a dismal track record.
Spatial researcher, designer, and land use PhD student Skylar Perez says, “Ultimately we need to have a better relationship to the land,” rather than withdrawing from it into artificial, controlled environments.
While I’m not aware of any utopian megastructure projects proposed for the Southwest region yet, many existing megastructures are currently sitting dormant in urban centers— vacant office buildings and dying shopping malls—a widespread urban condition nationwide. Staying in a hotel in downtown Denver recently, I amused myself by observing the office building across the way, void of people, most floors serving as storage for some stray boxes. A prodigious waste of space now, but maybe a site for conversion?
Adaptive reuse—successful examples of which are plentiful in cities like Denver and Albuquerque, where defunct industrial warehouses now feature vibrant urban markets—could be the most carbon-affordable architecture of the future, utilizing existing buildings and adapting them for the needs of the future. It is “a lighter way to create spaces we need or want,” says Murphy, but has its challenges, including light, ventilation, and plumbing. Could a converted glass-and-steel International Style skyscraper inspire as much excitement as a shiny new bauble?
Perez believes that the dominant modes of thinking relating to land use and the built environment, revolving around short-term considerations of capitalist gain and productivity, need to be entirely reversed. “Everything that we’re doing: [it] doesn’t have a future, it just has a price tag,” he says. Perez’s research looks to fungal and mycorrhizal networks as models of resiliency. Prioritizing soil health and water, “creating a more symbiotic Earth,” will be the key to our survival. One way to accomplish this is to “recontextualize the city,” by “reveal[ing] the underground and unseen inner systems of the built environment.” For instance: make plumbing visible, so we are forced to contend with our waste.
In the 2008 film Sleep Dealer, the U.S.-Mexico border is fully closed, fortified, and surveilled by deadly drones. Private corporations control the water supply. Mexican workers still perform manual labor in the U.S.—as remote workers, connected to “nodes” that allow them to control robots across the border.
Perhaps the most terrifying glimpse into the future of architecture can be seen at the border—where concrete detention facilities can go up in a matter of days and border surveillance and militarization is only bound to increase. The global market for “homeland security” is projected to reach nearly $1 trillion by 2031—an industry selling robot patrol dogs, “smart” border walls, and AI-powered surveillance systems.
Artist David Taylor (no relation to Chris Taylor), who has been observing the U.S.-Mexico border for more than twenty years, sums up the future of the border infrastructure in one word: “Proliferation. Border space is reproducing itself ad infinitum.” He describes the border system that has emerged since 9/11 as “a 1,900-mile-long service economy,” built and maintained largely by private contractors. “It’s an arms race,” he says, likening the ballooning industry to a cold war economy.
So-called “justice architecture”—prisons, jails, police stations—is a booming sector, anticipating more and more inmates in the years to come. Military and police training exercises are taking place in mock cities and suburbs, preparing for urban warfare.
Taylor’s long-term project documenting the immigrant detention industry shows “the built environment as a reflection of a national mindset,” he writes. The structures of border security, surveillance, and detention represent the values of society, rendered in concrete and steel. Reading the current built environment of detention centers, big box stores, and Amazon warehouses, the predominant zeitgeist of our current culture feels like one of fear, capital, and convenience.
Cormac McCarthy’s dire, apocalyptic novel The Road follows a man and his young son as they travel across a scorched, uninhabitable land. The premise of the novel, McCarthy once said in an interview, was inspired by imagining what the landscape of El Paso, Texas, could look like in fifty or 100 years—a landscape with “fires up on the hills, and everything laid waste.”
Speculative and science fiction offer us a view of a potential future, but it is up to us to imagine, then enact what our future will hold.
Speculative and science fiction offer us a view of a potential future, but it is up to us to imagine, then enact what our future will hold.
Environmental author Barry Lopez wrote in one of his final texts: “We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.” Lopez was issuing a call to prepare for the violent changes and instability the coming generations are facing—naming climate disruption, authoritarian regimes, and pandemics. “For me, that’s the question of this moment,” Chris Taylor says, “Have we forgotten how to build those boats?”
An architecture of the future doesn’t just mean what kinds of buildings we will have, it’s the entire underlying structure of our values and beliefs, and how they are reflected in the built environment. Everyone I talked to agreed that the way we build our cities and suburbs now encourages isolation, divides people, makes them strangers. We all long for community in our built environment.
“Ultimately we need to get to policy, but imagination is required first,” Taylor says.
Murphy delivers a prompt: “Science fiction assignment: rewrite the building code to create the city that you want to exist.”
For me, that’s a city that complements its local ecosystem, fosters community, favors bikeability and walkability, with repurposed and adapted buildings, with rewilded spaces and community gardens, rainwater collection and solar panels, buildings oriented to the sun and shade and wind, public transportation, and affordable housing for all, built upward instead of sprawling out.
“Over the course of the 20th century there [have been] so many attempts to standardize and cheapen the built environment,” Murphy says. “Part of the challenge for effective climate response is how responses can be sensitive to local conditions,” including considerations for wind, sun, and urban layout.
“What about the passive city?” Chris Taylor thinks out loud.
In Lydia Millett‘s novel A Children’s Bible, a destructive hurricane signals the end of the world. A group of children bands together and departs their deluded and debauched parents’ vacation rental, eventually seeking shelter in a high-tech silo stocked with firearms and food.
In the very end, long after we’re gone, what will be left in the landscape are the silos. They are impossible to destroy, an “architecture of resistance,” pictures Aziz, “impervious to tornadoes, detonations, virtually indestructible.”
The industrial agricultural silos will stand strong above, the intercontinental ballistic missile silos will remain firm below.
Those and the nuclear waste repositories, which will bear the mark of our presence on the earth for tens of thousands of years into the future.
Disclosure: Aziz and Perez have exhibited some of their research at the artist-run gallery Natalie Hegert co-directs in Lubbock. Chris Taylor is a member of Southwest Contemporary’s Community Editorial Advisory Board.
