Not Empty

Samia Henni launched her edited volume Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City) last Friday, sharing the stage with graphic designer Laura Coombs (also NYRA’s art director). The collection of essays, interviews, conversations, and poems scrutinizes colonial narratives that have enabled invasive projects of resource extraction and environmental destruction in arid lands. Henni, a professor of architecture at Cornell University, also cited the dearth of architectural histories of the desert and voiced her hope that the texts in this collection “might speak to everyone, not only to our discipline.” Coombs gave an overview of the publication’s main visual ideas, each beautifully and simply derived from an element of Henni’s editorial structure. Notably, the book’s fore-edge treatment reproduces the title in block letters and has the reader repeating Henni’s mantra over and over.