A Forsaken Place: Andrea Zittel's A-Z West Is A Laboratory For The Future →

Andrea Zittel
A-Z Wagon Station customized by Giovanni Jance
2003
Powder-coated steel, MDF, aluminum, Lexan,cushions, iPod Nano, headphones, solar iPod chargers
91 x 82 x 57 inches
© Andrea Zittel, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles


The desert is an unforgiving, but magnetic landscape. Agnes Pelton, Georgia O'Keeffe, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and many more artists have all been drawn to the desert of the American West. Its barrenness, its potential, its raw heat, its solitude, and liquid mirages all provide a contemplative and hot combination of all the right ecosystemic ingredients for artists to experiment and conceive of cosmic ideas. Even the word desert is alluring: it comes from the ecclesiastical Latin root desertum, which means a “forsaken” or “abandoned” place. Lately, though, the desert has become less a quirk of America’s multifold topography and more a frightening, but beautiful prelude to an arid, lifeless future on Earth. 

Andrea Zittel fits into the historical canon of artists lured to these forsaken and abandoned landscapes—abandoned by time and most botanic nature—but she isn’t so much a land artist as she is an artist of the land. Like the late artist and sculptor Noah Purifoy before her, Zittel is not a visitor—she is a guardian of the desert’s inexplicable potential as a testing ground for future civilizations who might live in a world that is going through a rapid process of what geologists call desertification.  According to scientists, over a third of the world is going through this process, and every year 120,000 square kilometers of land turns into an actual desert. Studies show that if global carbon emissions aren’t curbed, much of the Earth will become a desert by 2050. Read more. Originally published in Autre’s Biodiversity Issue, FW 2021

A Visit To The Miles C. Bates “Wave House” In Palm Desert

With it’s patented curving roof that mimics the peaks of the surrounding San Jacinto Mountains, the iconic Miles C. Bates “Wave House” has been brilliantly and expertly restored by Los Angeles-based Stayner Architects and is now available to book for overnight stays. Every inch of the home in its original incarnation—before a devastating series of remodels—has been reconsidered with exacting precision, save for a few minor modern amenities that enhance the home’s livability and that continue the architect’s vision for domestic desert bliss. Built for an archetypal, midcentury American playboy and sculptor, Miles C. Bates in 1955 by architect and inventor Walter S. White—a former apprentice of Rudolf Schindler—the house exudes the charm of high, but moderate living and square footage devoted to only the essentials; a less-is-more ethos that gives midcentury architecture its understated grandeur. But, while the physical footprint might be minimal, the house feels anything but cramped. The maximization and utilization of space makes the Wave House feel larger than life, a type of floor planning that belongs to only the greatest architects. Large sliding steel-framed glass doors and clerestory windows create a seamless transition from the great indoors to the great outdoors. The roller coaster roof undulates, giving the entire house a kind of oneness that is alluring and near mystical. With original terrazzo floors and ash wood panels, the house is a masterpiece of materiality and sensuous glamour; even the automated curtains have a kind of burlesque eroticism. A small cactus enclosure feels like a private peep show for thirsty and thorny flora. At night, a soaking tub beckons just steps from the bedroom. As architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius opined in his treatise for Roman architecture, that in order for buildings to have the perfect proportions, they must have three attributes: firmitas, utilitas and venustas (strength, utility and beauty). The Wave House has all three in spades. Click here to book your stay.