When I first entertained the idea of leaving Wisconsin in 2020 and buying a home in Palm Springs, I was notified by my realtor that any neighborhoods north of Vista Chino Drive were no-go zones for putting down roots. “Too windy,” he said. The hot flats of the Coachella Valley sit at a low point just east of two major mountain ranges—the San Jacinto and the San Bernardino. The further north you go toward the 10 Freeway, the more likely it is that your patio furniture will end up in the pool. I didn’t heed his advice at first, but after a few failed searches and plenty of sand in my shoes, I found a condo in the South Palm Springs neighborhood known as Canyon Corridor. Experiencing the wrath of haboobs has been scary enough here in my pocket of relative quietude, where houses nestled against the rocky outcrop benefit from some measure of wind protection. Of course, few neighborhoods were spared on August 21, 2023, when Hurricane Hilary flooded the arroyos and the normally dry Whitewater River.
It was on a particularly windy northern plot of land that the historic Palm Springs Country Club made the decision in 1960 to open its golf course—an odd choice, given the meteorological particulars of the location. Nonetheless, plans for the course and surrounding housing went forward, and residents lived there for roughly fifty years. In 2007, the site was closed and ostensibly left to the elements. The desert blew in with a vengeance. In the intervening years, there have been some complaints from neighboring homeowners of small fires, noisy ATVs, trash, and homeless encampments. The city was none the wiser in 2016, when it approved a 386-unit development named Serena Park, but a quick check on Google Earth reveals only the phantom outlines of the fairway and sanded-over tennis courts.
The Palm Springs Country Club was not the first golf course to close here and, owing to pressure from local residents on the city council who want more sustainable development solutions (including affordable housing), it will not be the last. Bel Air Greens, the Santa Rosa Golf Club, and Mesquite Country Club have all shuttered since 2014. In a move that has thrilled conservationists, the latter’s land was donated to a trust that promises to restore the site into a natural preserve.
It is in this context that I wish to evoke another aerial view: a vast terrain that appears less ghostly and more corporeal; latent sinews come into focus as bulldozers and other heavy machinery proceed to excavate in methodical if not orthogonal fashion. It’s still early days, so the clipped grass and asphalt have not yet been laid; nonetheless, it bears all the hallmarks of a gated community. Unsurprisingly, it is the Disney Corporation that has thrust itself headlong in the Valley. Billed as the first in a series of planned communities, Disney’s Cotino development sits on a plot located just southeast of Palm Springs in the city of Rancho Mirage. The ancestral home of the Aqua Caliente tribe of the Cahuilla Indians, as recently as one hundred years ago the area was dotted with date ranches.
The mirage mythology was a convenient narrative for early developers: Picture untouched land as far as the eye can see. Reductionist tropes of the desert begin with its Latin roots, as desertum promises prospective buyers equal parts sublimity and adventure. Today, Rancho Mirage’s demographics skew older, whiter, and more conservative than surrounding communities’. Its built legacy lies in fairway-adjacent residential architecture; Cotino will be an exponentially larger addition to this typology. Encompassing a jaw-dropping 618 acres, the plan proposes the development of almost 2,000 residential units, with a significant percentage dedicated to a fifty-five-plus neighborhood (no affordable housing, mind you); two 200-bed resort hotels; 175,000 square feet of commercial space; a town center; bike paths; and, yes, at least one golf course. Home types vary but offer a reassuring stylistic palate that reads something along the lines of choose your own adventure, Southern California edition: Spanish and/or Mission Revival, bungalow, ranch, and midcentury modern.
Disney is betting big not only on Canadians and Midwesterners (and increasingly, those seeking an escape from soggy Seattle) looking to buy snowbird second homes, but also on a continued exurban migration only exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Indeed, those same ranges that separated the desert from more verdant points west now appear less as edge conditions than minor obstacles to the horizontal expansion of greater Los Angeles.
Originally part of the Annenberg estate, Cotino sits across the street from the family’s swanky compound and erstwhile geopolitical conclave known as Sunnylands, which was completed in 1966 by A. Quincy Jones, then dean of USC’s School of Architecture. Today, Sunnylands is held in a trust whose namesake Annenberg Foundation (to whom ownership was transferred in 2009) takes great pains to feature in a land acknowledgment on its website. Founded by philanthropists Walter and Leonore Annenberg, the trust is attempting to keep up with the times, and in recognition of current climatic precarities, the board has also overhauled its irrigation and turf management in order to reduce water demands. More recent developments also include an engineered wetland that treats the wastewater from campus buildings on-site.
The Foundation Trust might now regret its decision to unload the holding at the intersection of Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra Drives. Disney, seeking to assuage any concerns among local residents, lifted a page from the Sunnylands playbook and has promised a wealth of sustainability innovations, touting a “strong commitment to environmental stewardship,” in the form of “alternative” and “innovative” planet-friendly strategies. For all this thoughtful greenwashing, the decision to build Cotino Bay, a twenty-four-acre water feature encircled by a sandy promenade amid the persistent threat of drought was tone-deaf at best. The so-called Grand Oasis (real—definitely not a mirage) comes courtesy of Crystal Lagoons, whose patented technology claims to use “thirty-three times less” water than your run-of-the-mill eighteen holes. That’s all well and good, but water—any water—is a luxury here. Cotino, in Disney’s renderings, is imagined to be full of it—enough to sustain the artificial basin, alongside a “beach park” replete with resource-guzzling recreational activities.
“The mirage mythology was a convenient narrative for early developers: Picture untouched land as far as the eye can see. Reductionist tropes of the desert begin with its Latin roots, as desertum promises prospective buyers equal parts sublimity and adventure.”
Cotino is not the corporation’s first foray into pattern-book living, or what it calls “Storyliving.” Florida boasts some of the corporation’s most well-known developments; Celebration in particular was a full-throated ’90s embrace of New Urbanist placemaking that was meant as a fitting legacy to EPCOT’s utopian aspirations. Among Disney’s current rivals for theme-park-cum-resort living in the Sunshine State is Universal Parks and Resorts, which boasts “affordable workforce housing” in conjunction with “lifestyle enhancements”—a laughable notion, since the conglomerate still lags in providing its workers a living wage.
Back in the California desert, Disneyland’s fairy dust–sprinkled alternative reality was inspired in large part by Fred and Maziebelle Markham’s Smoke Tree Ranch, a weekender enclave of private homes and guest cottages established in 1938 that persists as an early example of curated living in Palm Springs. Walt Disney was a self-proclaimed “colonist” enchanted by the mystique of the community’s down-home informality and, in the immediate post-war years, commissioned William F. Cody to conceive a quintessential ranch house. While it was architecturally unremarkable, the residence (it was sold to fund the theme park) lived on in Disneyland’s nostalgic dioramas that appeared authentic but in fact flattened the heterogeneous realities of this region. Tomorrowland played host to Monsanto’s plastic House of the Future, but it was Frontierland that manifested everything Disney loved about the West in general and the desert in particular. Replete with rugged landscapes, main streets, and cowboys, the two settings told a sanitized vision of Western life, while train rides through the Painted Desert, a scenic stretch inside the theme park, envisioned a Technicolor landscape of rock formations and dancing cacti.
That was then and this is now. Disney imagineers might be better served drawing inspiration from organizations like High Desert Test sites (HDTS)—a nonprofit art platform founded by Andrea Zittel that dedicates itself to mining the creative opportunities afforded by the desert and to a kind of dream-crafting that aspires to live gently with the landscape, not in spite of it. HDTS now forms part of Zittel’s larger eponymous A-Z West, an encampment established in 2000 that succinctly analogizes the frontier spirit. An arid plot in the high desert, it now encompasses over eighty acres of loosely arranged “acts of living”: cabins, open-air baths, and a communal kitchen all punctuated by carefully positioned sleeping pods (Wagon Stations).
A historical and equally salient point of reference could be the work of the LA-based design research group Chrysalis. Founded in 1970, the collective comprised four UCLA grads: Mike Davies, Chris Dawson, Alan Stanton, and Joseph Valerio, who, like Disney (and even more fittingly like that self-proclaimed “desert freak” Reyner Banham), felt a kinship with the parched rift. As historian Whitney Moon has noted, Banham’s rhetorical “Environment-Bubble” graduated from “ideation to inhabitation” with Chrysalis’s determination to achieve proofs of concept. Installed in nearby Palm Desert in 1971, Solar Mat, Strolee Playpen, and Pneudome reveled in a countercultural radicalism balanced with an equally determined technical pragmatism. Their bubbles—like the ground they sat on—worked because of the (perceived) fragility of their skins.
Photographs of Chrysalis’s luminescent sand-locked membranes reflect the deft stagecraft of architects who honed their skills designing sets for Hollywood. While Cotino’s heavy footprint runs counter to the region’s more nuanced architectural imaginaries, Chrysalis’s less carbon-intensive “windbags” (to borrow another Banhamism) leaned on a different kind of performance: their resilience mirrored a fundamental understanding of the land as a dynamic field of (untapped) embodied energy. On the face of it, it seems ironic that these light constructions would offer durable solutions to desert living. But with wind advisories on the rise, shelter—not another country club—is the name of the game.